So Far, It’s the Year of the Duck

The Mighty Ducks have half a season left to try to catch a playoff spot from behind.

They moved a small step closer Wednesday night by not getting caught from behind by the Florida Panthers.

The Ducks won, 3-2, even though they had to hang on by their toenails after nearly blowing a 3-0 first-period lead.

Nevertheless, the Ducks won, beating Florida in front of 17,174 at the Pond of Anaheim. It was their second triumph over the Panthers in little more than a week after a 3-0 victory on New Year’s Day in Miami.

The loss was only the Panthers’ 11th of the season, and it made the Ducks the only team besides Philadelphia to beat them twice.

It has been a strange stretch for Anaheim. The Ducks have lost five of their last eight, but they’ve twice beaten the Panthers, who have one of the NHL’s best records.

“We were on our heels for a little while there,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said. “I would have liked to have won, 4-2 or 5-2. But 3-2 is not bad. Having that battle at the end was probably good for our team.”

They haven’t won all those battles recently, twice losing games they led, 2-0, on the last trip, falling to New Jersey and Tampa Bay.

“I think sometimes you learn from those mistakes,” defenseman Bobby Dollas said. “All those games, we had a game plan. Then we’d stick to it 20 minutes--or 19 1/2 minutes--and make a mental error.

“We’ve squandered some leads. We have to instill some killer instinct.”

Wilson called the Ducks “a fragile team” at the moment.

“You’re up, 3-0, and it’s 3-2. It’s just natural to think, ‘Here we go again,’ ” he said. “That’s tough on everybody. But we battened down the hatches.”

At the halfway mark of the season, the Ducks are tied for ninth in the Western Conference, four points out of a playoff spot. Their 15-21-5 record gives them 35 points--one more than they had at this juncture last season, when they missed the playoffs by one point after the acquisition of Teemu Selanne in February fueled a late-season run.

“You get to February and March, and wins are harder to come by,” winger Warren Rychel said. “Obviously we’re not in a playoff spot yet; it’s going to be that much harder.”

Florida, which hadn’t played since beating the Kings, 5-0, on Saturday, has faltered recently, winning only one of its last six games, and tying two.

Until last week, the Ducks had never beaten their 1993 expansion rivals, but the streak is at two now.

This time, the Ducks took the lead 1:22 into the game, when Selanne scored his 23rd goal of the season and fourth in the last five games.

Steve Rucchin, who set up Selanne for the first goal, scored off a pass from Paul Kariya at 10:20 of the period for a 2-0 lead.

Kariya had assists on the first two goals, and has eight points the last five games. His streak without a goal, however, has grown to eight games. Remarkably, that equals the longest drought of his career, an eight-game stretch during his rookie season in February 1995.

The game looked as if it was going to be a laugher after Rychel chased down Brian Bellows’ dump-in and one-timed the puck into the net as it caromed off the boards to make the score 3-0 with more than two minutes left in the first period.

The next laugh belonged to the Panthers, though. They went into the first intermission trailing by only two after a play quickly went the other way and Bill Lindsay scored with 1:22 left in the period.

Only 5:32 into the second, it was a one-goal game again after Ed Jovanovski’s point shot was deflected past goalie Guy Hebert by David Nemirovsky. The goal was Nemirovsky’s first in the NHL.

But Hebert held fast the rest of the way, finishing with 30 saves and thwarting three Panther power plays.

“Hebert. He’s their best penalty-killer,” Florida Coach Doug MacLean said.