Red Wings fall to Ducks
2/11/2008DETROIT - Mathieu Schneider came back to haunt his old team.
He had a goal and an assist to lift the Anaheim Ducks to a 3-2 win over the Detroit Red Wings yesterday.
Ryan Carter and Kent Huskins also scored for Anaheim, which won its fourth straight. Jean-Sebastien Giguere made 27 saves.
Pavel Datsyuk and Johan Franzen got the goals for NHL-leading Detroit, which lost its third straight. Chris Osgood stopped 16 shots.
An apparent game-tying goal by the Red Wings' Nicklas Lidstrom with 40 seconds left was waved off by referee Dan O'Halloran because of incidental contact with Giguere by Tomas Holmstrom.
Schneider, who played with Detroit for four seasons before signing with Anaheim as a free agent last summer, broke a 1-1 tie 8:28 into the second period and put the Ducks in the lead for good. It was the first time the defenseman has played at Joe Louis Arena since leaving Detroit and he wasn't booed until he scored.
"I guess you expect a little bit. The fans treated me tremendously when I was here," Schneider said. "I hope there are no hard feelings."
His slap shot from the point beat Osgood after changing directions for his eighth goal.
The goal was made possible when it appeared that Osgood was freezing the puck in the crease, but Chris Kunitz knocked it away into the right corner, retrieved it and then passed to Schneider.
Osgood wasn't happy about the way Kunitz did it.
"You can't bodycheck a goalie in the crease and knee him," Osgood said. "I don't know if he even got it with the stick. He just kneed me right in the head."
Huskins gave Anaheim a two-goal lead with 4:42 left in the second period when the puck bounced in off Osgood after he made the original save. Huskins got past Brian Rafalski, Franzen and Brett Lebda and swept in off the left wing for his third goal.
"I got a nice kind of bounce in front of the net," Huskins said.
Schneider got the lone assist on the goal.
Franzen's power-play goal 6:07 into the third period pulled the Red Wings within one. He got his 11th goal on a backhand under the crossbar from just in front of the net after making a move.
And with Detroit skating 6-on-4 because of a minor penalty to Anaheim's Francois Beauchemin and Osgood pulled for an extra attacker in the last minute, Lidstrom's one-time slap shot beat Giguere. But O'Halloran ruled that Holmstrom, who was right in front of Giguere, made contact with the Anaheim goalie.
"It was a tough call. A lot of times they don't call it," Giguere said. "It took a lot of guts to make that call. On the replay you can see his skate is in the crease. And he was preventing me from doing what I've got to do."