Leafs choke on Duck

By LANCE HORNBY -- Toronto Sun
In his greatest wrestling days at the Gardens, The Sheik never applied a better camel clutch than the Anaheim Mighty Ducks put on the mobile Maple Leafs last night.

"That," Toronto winger Steve Thomas said, "was a terrible game to watch. We must have turned the puck over 1,000 times in the neutral zone."

Actually, the Leafs committed just 21 giveaways but, with the passing lanes shut down, it was enough for Anaheim to derail the top scoring team in the NHL's Eastern Conference, 2-0.

Toronto had a season-low 19 shots in stretching its winless string to a season-high three games (0-2-1-0).

"For sure this was our worst game of the year," said Leafs captain Mats Sundin, who was held pointless for the first time in eight games. "I didn't think they had a strong game, either, but it was good enough to beat us."

Goaltender Guy Hebert and the Ducks celebrated their initial visit to the Air Canada Centre with their first win in Toronto since a 1-0 shutout in their Maple Leaf Gardens debut in December 1993. That was the night the smug Leafs served duck l'orange in a pre-game meal in anticipation of an easy win.

EMPTY-NET GOAL

Last night, Marty McInnis scored in the second period and Paul Kariya added an empty-net goal.

"We lost three hours (in time difference) on the way here and none of us felt good this morning," Hebert said after his 24th career shutout. "Toronto plays with a lot of finesse and the best way for us to respond is to use our speed, take the pressure off our defence."

Hebert agreed the complexion of the game might have changed in the opening minutes as the Leafs' Sergei Berezin and Yanic Perreault came down on a 2-on-1. Berezin made a rare pass, Perreault misfired and Berezin hit the post with Hebert still out of position. That's when the eggplant-and-teal curtain came down.

"If there's nothing going for us at their blue line, we just have to get it in there," Thomas said of the many Leafs trying to dipsy-doodle through the Ducks.

Anaheim, improving to 8-6-2-1, hit the post three times or the count could've been higher.

McInnis scored at 7:48 of the second period after Jonas Hoglund fanned on a puck while pinching and Dmitry Yushkevich lost track of the Ducks forward in the slot after the ensuing odd-man rush.

Kariya got the clincher at 19:47. Perreault had won a faceoff with goalie Curtis Joseph on the bench but the Leafs couldn't control it.

It was the first time the Leafs have been shut out in a regular-season game at the Air Canada Centre.

The big scorers on both teams quickly faded from view before 19,148 fans, who grew more surly as the Leafs' frustration increased.

BLAHS

"We just seemed to have the blahs," general manager/coach Pat Quinn said, saying the Leafs hadn't been that ineffective against a neutral-zone trap team in 11/2 years. "A number of guys on our team should've eaten up a game like that."

Berezin supplied six of the Leafs shots, defenceman Tomas Kaberle three, while Joseph did his job stopping 23.

The revamped Leafs power play, which has had Sundin on the point since Alexander Karpovtsev was injured last Friday against the Washington Capitals, continued to dip as it tried to break a five-game, 1-for-18 skid. On a second-period penalty to Anaheim's Oleg Tverdovsky, the entire two minutes elapsed without a shot.

The schedule gets progressively harder for Toronto this week with games against the revitalized Bruins in Boston tomorrow and at home against the Detroit Red Wings on Saturday.

Karpovtsev came back after a game off to rest a strained shoulder, but Quinn dropped winger Todd Warriner and had Chris McAllister in uniform as a seventh defenceman as insurance. McAllister didn't play.

Before Tie Domi banged up his ribs on Oct. 30, Warriner had been designated to be the first of Quinn's rotating healthy scratches.

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