Some Wobbles Leave Little Wiggle Room

This is no time, if you’re a Mighty Duck, for history to repeat itself.

A year ago, the Ducks lost seven consecutive games after the Christmas break, one in overtime. They managed to right themselves and push on to the playoffs.

But a similar tumble this season would be disastrous.

“We don’t have much of a choice but to come out and play well,” team captain Steve Rucchin said.

The Ducks had a cushion to work with last season. They won six of seven games heading into the break, which was the foundation for their later success.

This season, they wobbled into the break, losing four of five games, scoring only five goals. They are last in the Pacific Division and have scored fewer than two goals in 14 of 34 games.

Awaiting the Ducks is a five-game road swing against Florida, Tampa Bay, Carolina, Buffalo and Detroit. The Ducks go into that carrying a 12-game road winless streak (0-7-2-3). They will play 13 games the first 24 days in January.

“We need to come out of this break a new team,” Rucchin said. “We need to forget about the way we have played up until now. This can be a fresh start for us all.”

*

On Monday, Stanislav Chistov scored the first goal of what has been a disappointing season for the second-year forward. It mattered little in the short term, because the Ducks lost to San Jose, 2-1.

“It was a big goal for me,” said Chistov, who scored 12 goals as a rookie. “But we lost the game and that’s the most important thing.”

*

Chistov went back to his NHL roots to get his first goal: San Jose.

Chistov’s first NHL experience was in the HP Pavilion. As an 11-year-old living in the Bay Area, Chistov was part of a youth team that played during the intermission of a playoff game involving San Jose and Detroit in 1994.

“We played the Junior Sharks, just a bunch of us who were from Canada and Russia,” Chistov said. “It was hard being a little guy in front of 20,000 people, all of them rooting against us. I was scoreless.”

The star for the Red Wings that night? Sergei Fedorov, now Chistov’s teammate on the Ducks.

“He scored a couple of goals that night,” Chistov said.

When told that Chistov had been in San Jose that night, Fedorov looked across the Duck dressing room and said, “Stanley, is that true?” Chistov smiled, bashfully.