The Ducks open a home-and-home set with the Avalanche tonight at Honda Center, hosting Colorado in the finale of a brief two-game homestand.
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Anaheim hopes to leave its home ice with a streak-snapping victory, as the club's winless skid hit eight games in a tight 5-4 loss to Washington on Thursday.
"Every team is going to go through these stretches," winger Brock McGinn said. "It's just about everybody sticking together in here, just coming to work the next day and trying to get better any way we can and growing as a group. We know what we're capable of, we've just got to go out and do it for a full 60 minutes."
"I think it came down to us making some bad decisions with the puck and them getting some chances," added McGinn's linemate, Brett Leason. "Penalty kills, we took four in the third. They were able to get that two-goal lead late in the game, which hurt us. Obviously, we played a good last 40 minutes, but we've got to start finding a way to come up with some points and some wins here."
The loss dropped Anaheim to 9-14-0 on the season, seventh in the Pacific Division.
"At the end of the day, we can't keep taking penalties," head coach Greg Cronin said. "We took four penalties, five if you put [Radko Gudas'] in there, in the third period. That's absurd. Two nights ago, we take one at the end of the game when we're pressing. It's a 2-1 game and we take one with a minute and 40 seconds to go, or whatever it was. Most of them are these lazy penalties where a guy's stick is right up into another guy's hands, and they're easy calls to make. I told them afterwards, 'I don't know what else to say to you.' We keep doing it. It's called insanity."
The Ducks have been shorthanded an NHL-most 104 times this season, 16 more than the next closest team.
They'll look to flip that script in a rare Saturday night game at Honda Center, shooting for a better result than the season's first meeting - an 8-2 Avalanche win last month in Denver.
“We just didn't have a good game,” Cronin said that night. “We just played six games in [10] nights, it's a back-to-back game and there wasn't a lot of legs. Brain wasn't working. We were consistently bad from the start to the finish.”
Since then, the Avs rolled to a 5-1-1 record and back to the top of the Central Division standings, but that overtime loss came just a few nights ago, a 4-3 setback to the division rival Coyotes.
“I didn't think we played our best tonight, so to able to come back in the third after giving up some goals that we didn’t like and squaring it … we almost survived it,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar told reporters postgame. “Would have loved to have two points out of it, but we’ll take the one and learn from it.”
Colorado’s lineup includes a pair of former Ducks in defenseman Josh Manson and winger Andrew Cogliano. Due to various injuries over the last two seasons, the physical, aggressive Manson has not played against his original NHL club since departing in a trade deadline deal in March 2022. Selected by Anaheim in the sixth round of the 2011 NHL Draft, Manson played his first 453 games as a Duck. Cogliano spent eight seasons in Anaheim (2011-19), skating in two Western Conference Finals and becoming one of 25 players in NHL history to play in 500 consecutive games.
The Avalanche (15-6-1, 31 points) hold a two-point lead over the Stars for first-place in the Central Division.
