Lucky Ducks Will Take It, 2-1

Call it the luck of the Mighty Ducks.

There was plenty of Irish green in the air Friday night at the half-filled United Center, but the faces on the Ducks nearly turned several shades of red after allowing the hapless Chicago Blackhawks to hang around all game and nearly tie it in the final seconds.

A sense of relief prevailed when the final horn sounded in the Ducks’ 2-1 victory, preserved only after a point-blank shot by the Blackhawks’ Patrick Sharp hit the post and ricocheted off the crossbar.

“I heard the ping and then I didn’t hear the buzz of that big horn so I was pretty happy not to hear that,” Duck goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere said. “Then I saw the puck going into the corner.

“I’m just happy that I got lucky on that play. Sometimes you do get lucky.”

The Ducks (32-21-12) will gladly take a little luck on a night when their mental game wavered against a team that entered Friday tied with the St. Louis Blues for the lowest point total in the Western Conference.

The victory, their fourth in five games, lifted them to within one point of the idle Kings for the eighth playoff spot. The Ducks also have four games in hand on the Kings and three games in hand on Vancouver, which has two more points after winning Friday to jump into seventh.

“We didn’t play our best [game] in the last little while,” captain Scott Niedermayer said. “There were times in the game where we weren’t really moving our feet and it got us into trouble. We found a way to win and we needed the points desperately.”

They also got a healthy dose of skill from center Andy McDonald, who provided all the scoring in notching his fourth two-goal game this season.

The performance was another highlight in a breakout season for the fourth-year player. After the Ducks got serious to start the third after a sluggish second period, McDonald got the decisive goal at the 1:57 mark.

McDonald took a shot that the Blackhawks’ Duncan Keith blocked, but the defenseman fell to the ice. With some extra time and open space, he got the puck and put a wicked shot into the top right corner of the net past Nikolai Khabibulin.

“I tried to get the first one through, but I think it hurt the defenseman,” McDonald said. “Fortunately it gave me some time there with the puck and I was able to find a hole.”

McDonald’s two goals gave him a career-high 60 points, marking the first time the Ducks have had two such scorers since 1999-2000. Teemu Selanne leads the team with 62.

The Ducks followed up on a strong first period by grabbing the lead early in the second. As he led a two-on-one break with Selanne, McDonald went with a low wrist shot that went between Khabibulin’s pads.

Chicago’s Kyle Calder tied it on a shot that deflected in off Niedermayer’s stick. That was it for the Blackhawks as Giguere had another strong performance with 22 saves.

“Jiggy played strong in the net,” Coach Randy Carlyle said. “We had areas in our game that were pretty good.”

And he also got a healthy shot of good fortune on Sharp’s shot with eight seconds left. After pulling Khabibulin for an extra attacker, the Blackhawks got a two-man advantage when Ruslan Salei was called for holding.

Carlyle, though, was quick to shrug that off. “They got to put it in the net,” he said. “That’s what the post is there for.”