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Giguere blanks Sharks as Ducks earn first win

Oct 18, 2008 - 6:50 AM ANAHEIM, California (Ticker) -- Not only did Jean-Sebastien Giguere stop every shot he faced, the former Conn Smythe Trophy winner stopped his team's losing streak as well.

Giguere made 38 saves and defenseman Francois Beauchemin scored what turned out to be the game-winning goal as the Anaheim Ducks earned their first win of the season, a 4-0 blanking of the San Jose Sharks on Friday.

"These are the things that we can build on," Giguere said. "We got our first win. We're happy with it. The last game was a starting point. Now we just have to keep going forward and try to put some good games together."

Recognized as the most valuable player of the 2003 playoffs before becoming a major contributor to the Ducks' 2007 Stanley Cup championship run, Giguere registered his first shutout of the season and 30th career while handing the Pacific Division rival Sharks (4-1-0) their first loss.

"I've been working pretty hard in practice," Giguere said. "Eventually, these things are going to turn around. I believe that you create your own luck and that the bounces are eventually going to go your way. Tonight, the bounces went my way."

Giguere, whose last shutout came on February 5 against the New York Islanders, turned aside 14 shots in the first period, 18 in the second and six in the third.

"My positioning was better than it was in the first few games," he said. "I was seeing the puck a lot better tonight. There weren't as many sticks in the way. The bounces went my way."

Beauchemin blasted a slap shot from just inside the offensive zone off a pass from fellow blue-liner Kent Huskins that beat goaltender Evgeni Nabokov with 1:47 left in the first period, giving the Ducks a 1-0 lead.

"(Beauchemin) got a big goal there to kick-start us," Anaheim defenseman Chris Pronger said. "Right off that goal, we got a lot of life, really started to bear down and synch things up defensively."

Pronger was especially happy with the team's resiliency.

"You could call it pride," Pronger said. "Or desperation. You just have to dig deeper. We could point fingers and blame one another, or we could look in the mirror and do better."

Travis Moen doubled the advantage 3:56 into the second. Nabokov let Ducks captain Scott Niedermayer's shot from the blue line bounce off his chest, but the rebound fell into traffic in front before Moen gathered the loose puck on the doorstep and buried it.

The Ducks, who were 30-1-2 when leading after two periods last season, netted their first power-play goal of the campaign early in the third after entering play 0-for-13 with the man advantage. Pronger unleashed a hard slap shot from the blue line, beating Nabokov for his first tally at 1:50 of the session.

"Nice. Very nice," Pronger said. "It certainly helps the cause, and it was nice to get rid of a couple of goose eggs tonight on a lot of fronts."

Samuel Pahlsson sealed the victory with a breakaway goal 7 1/2 minutes later and Rob Niedermayer collected two assists for Anaheim (1-4-0), which avoided dropping the first five games of a season for the first time since in 2003-04.

"Our goaltender kept us in the game tonight," Rob Niedermayer said. "The difference between tonight and the other games is cutting down the turnovers. In the other games, we'd give the puck away and we were always chasing it."

San Jose entered as one of five teams without a loss - and one of five without receiving a fighting major. However, Brad Staubitz, Jody Shelley and Joe Thornton all engaged in scuffles in the opening period, when 13 penalties were called.

"I thought we came out of the first period with some good shifts and some good plays at the net. We just didn't bury the opportunities," Shelley said. "We felt pretty good going into the second period. We thought we had them right where we wanted, but we didn't capitalize when we had the opportunity tonight.

"They're a desperate team, and they wanted to forecheck and hit. So a couple of things happened, and it just had to be done."

After becoming the first coach in Sharks history to win his first four games and lead the team to a 4-0-0 record to start the season, Todd McLellan suffered his first loss.

"It was a strange night because we weren't awful," McLellan said. "We competed hard physically. We didn't have a lot of smooth polish with the puck. It bounced around on us a lot.

"I'm not sure their desperation outmatched our desperation. I thought we came to play and played hard. They worked really hard and earned their breaks, and they earned a 4-0 win. It wasn't that we just mailed it in, we competed pretty hard and it just didn't go our way. There are some areas we have to improve on."

Sharks captain Patrick Marleau, who appeared in his 800th career game, had three shots on goal.

"We had a lot of shots, but certainly we could have had a few more, and there were some rebounds that were just out of our reach," Marleau said. "You've got to be able to capitalize on your shots."

Nabokov made 16 saves for San Jose, which outshot Anaheim, 38-20, overall and by an 18-6 margin in the second.

Despite the loss, McLellan saw many similarities from the Sharks' season-opening 4-1 victory over the Ducks on October 9.

"It was kind of a complete role reversal from opening night," McLellan said. "I thought they did some good things opening night and we happened to get the breaks. Tonight, we never put any by Giguere and they worked hard for their breaks."