By Ray Van Horn, Jr. Copyright 1999
 

Coyotes roster

Perhaps it was the late day announcement of the suspension of three key players for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim an hour before their showdown against the Phoenix Coyotes. Perhaps it was an effort to erase the moniker of "dirty players" recently attributed them. Whatever it was, the Ducks choked, sputtered and impotently sloshed their way to a sparkless 4-0 drubbing at the hands of the highly-charged, intensely motivated Coyotes.

Ruslan Salei, Pascal Trepanier and Jim McKenzie were all missing from the Anaheim roster, each serving 10, 5 and 4 game suspensions respectively for separate incidents in their game against the Dallas Stars on October 2nd, the worst of which comes as a result of Salei's overzealous hit on Mike Modano, who narrowly avoided serious injury from a hideous head-ramming. Their presences were sorely missed.

Anaheim and Phoenix skated conservatively at the beginning of the game, cautiously forechecking until Phoenix tallied its first score at 9:23 of the first period on a Dallas Drake chipper from teammate Jeremy Roenick. It was Drake's first goal of the season.

Roenick scored his own first goal on the year at 12:57 of the first on a dazzling play down ice in which he passed to Mike Sullivan, who, in turn, fired a dandy backwards return pass to Roenick. Roenick took advantage of a befuddled Kevin Haller on Anaheim's defense and sneaked the goal over a sprawled Guy Hebert, giving the Coyotes a 2-0 lead at the end of the period.

Having outshot the Ducks 12-4 through one period, Phoenix continued their relentless attack, needling their way past Hebert on two goals in the second period by Shane Doan. Doan's first came at 3:17 after a vigorous series of forechecking out of the neutral zone, while he nabbed his second on the evening with a lightning fast topshelf slapshot. Jeremy Roenick picked up his second assist on the play. It was at the point that Guy Hebert was yanked in favor of backup goalminder, Dominic Roussel. Hebert had given up 4 goals on 16 shots.

The Ducks could not seem to master Phoenix's Mikhail Shtalenkov, who assumed net duties for the Coyotes in lieu of brickwalled negotiations with regular goalie Nikolai Khabibulin. Shtalenkov, a former Duck, notched his 7th career shutout.

The lackluster performance for the Ducks was underscored by the inability of Teemu Selanne and Paul Kariya to create scoring opportunities. The Ducks power play, #1 in the NHL a year ago, went 0 for 4. Perhaps the only moral victory allotted the Ducks was a major scrum in which Stu Grimmson dispatched Phoenix's Kevin Sawyer in a lopsided duke.

The shutout is Anaheim's second in as many games.