"Do Ducks Know The Way to San Jose?"

(Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

The Ducks fly north to open up the Stanley Cup Playoffs against this years President Trophy winning San Jose Sharks. 

The Ducks and Sharks met six times in the regular season with San Jose winning four out of the six. Now that the playoffs have arrived the series is zeroed out and both teams have a clean slate.

What we can expect to see in this series is a lot of emotion and bad blood between two teams that are very familiar with each other. 

 San Jose has been the cream of the crop all season and has played consistent hockey (53-18-11 = 117 points). The Ducks (42-33-7 = 91 points) on the other hand were inconsistent for most of the season circling around the lower depths of the Western Conference falling as low as 12th, but were able to put together a great final campaign and make it into the playoffs. 

The Ducks closed the final 13 games of the regular season with 10 victories and Randy Carlyle seems to have found a working formula for his trade deadline acquisitions; Ryan Whitney, James Wisniewski, Pettri Nokelainan, and Erik Christensen.

The Ducks and Sharks were only able to muster up 12 goals a piece against each other in the regular season, but expect to see more points tallied up in the playoff series. The Ducks will have to figure out how to get the puck behind Nabokov and when they do it, it needs to be early and often. The Ducks tend to play better when they are ahead rather than behind.

The first line of Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Bobby Ryan are young, but dangerous every time they are on the ice. They need to keep their cool, put up big numbers and stay out of the penalty box. If this line can out produce the Sharks top line of Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Devon Setoguchi than the Ducks will have a shot of upsetting the top seed in the West. 

More importantly for Carlyle is that he has finally found a replacement for Andy McDonald on the second line to play along side with Teemu Selanne. Andrew Ebbet (8- 24 = 32 points) in his rookie campaign has played in only 48 games and has fit in nicely feeding Selanne with some spectacular passes. Ebbet’s speed compliments Selanne’s and he is able to keep up with the Finnish Flash. Both players seem to connect out on the ice and have a great chemistry. This tandem became even more dangerous with the addition of Drew Miller (3-1 = 4 points, last 12 games of the regular season) who has contributed since being recalled from the Iowa Chops back in early March. 

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