SAN JOSE — A fortunate bounce and a splendid shootout move are what it took for the San Jose Sharks to finally get some pucks past Ryan Miller.
Joonas Donskoi used a nifty move to score the deciding goal in the sixth round of the shootout, and San Jose rallied for its season-high fourth straight win, beating the Anaheim Ducks 2-1 on Saturday night.
“Our games with these guys are always like that,” Sharks coach Peter DeBoer said. “It’s always 1-0, 2-1, 3-2. It’s almost like a script. It’s nice to be on the right end of it tonight. We got contributions from everybody. Their goalie was really good. I thought we could have had a few more.”
Joel Ward tied the game midway through the third, setting the stage for the shootout that kept the Sharks perfect through three games of this homestand. Martin Jones made 25 saves to win for the seventh time in eight starts.
Corey Perry scored to highlight his 900th career game but it wasn’t enough to prevent the Ducks from losing their third straight game.
Miller made 44 saves, but couldn’t stop Donskoi when he faked to the backhand before stickhandling his way past Miller to tuck the puck into the net with a forehand.
“It was a little too good to be true that he was heading kind of where I was thinking he was going to go,” Miller said. “He hit the brakes pretty hard and I thought I had waited long enough to move he was definitely setting that one up.”
Jones then sealed the game when he stopped Brandon Montour.
This matchup followed the pattern of the previous meetings between the California rivals. This marked the ninth straight game between the teams decided by one goal or in a shootout with neither scoring more than three goals in any of those contests. San Jose has now won three of those.
The Sharks tied the game midway through the third period. The play started when the puck took an off bounce off the boards, sending Ward and Barclay Goodrow in short-handed on a 2-on-1 rush. Ward passed to Goodrow, whose shot was stopped by Miller. But Ward was there to knock the rebound into the open net just one second after Dylan DeMelo got out of the box.
“He made a play over to me and the defenseman came to me, I just kind of slide it over to him and just kind of got a rebound of his shot and it went in,” Ward said. “It was a good feeling, for sure. It’s always fun to see when nobody is in the net there. It was a good play, good goal.”
There were chances in the second period when there were a combined 31 shots on goal, but neither team managed to get a puck past the goalie. Miller made a strong save on a rebound attempt by Chris Tierney midway through the period and then stopped him again from in close late in the second, preserving a 1-0 lead.
“He gave us a chance,” Ducks coach Randy Carlyle said. “That’s all you can ask of your goaltender. He was outstanding the net for us, got us to a shootout, we lost the shootout but we still got a point off a back-to-back.”
Jones made sure San Jose didn’t get into a deeper hole when he robbed Jakob Silfverberg twice late after a bad giveaway in the defensive zone by Justin Braun.
The Ducks, playing the second half of a back-to-back, struck first when Perry got past defenseman Brenden Dillon for a breakaway off a nice feed from Derek Grant and beat Jones less than seven minutes into the game.
NOTES: Ducks F Andrew Cogliano became the fourth player to play in 800 consecutive games and joined Doug Jarvis (964) as the only players to do it from the start of their careers. … Sharks D Marc-Edouard Vlasic missed the game with a concussion and D Paul Martin remained sidelined by a lower-body injury.
UP NEXT
Ducks: Host Los Angeles on Tuesday night.
Sharks: Host Tampa Bay on Wednesday night.
