The Utah Hockey Club looks to continue its hottest stretch of the season when it hosts the Anaheim Ducks on Sunday afternoon.
Utah has won a season-high four in a row and has earned at least a point in seven straight games (6-0-1).
Utah most recently beat the Minnesota Wild 2-1 on Friday in St. Paul, Minn. The Wild came into the game with the third-most points in the Western Conference (44).
Utah also beat the Vancouver Canucks and Colorado Avalanche during the current winning streak, two teams that are also well above .500.
“You don’t go from struggling a little bit to winning on a consistent basis,” Utah head coach Andre Tourigny said. “You climb slowly and start to play better defensively, and even if we weren’t winning a lot, we were playing better.”
Leading the way for Utah has been 21-year-old right winger Dylan Guenther, who comes in riding a seven-game point streak with six goals in the past four games.
He scored both goals in the win against the Wild.
“I think when the team has success, so do the individuals,” Guenther said. “So I’m just kind of the beneficiary of it, and our line’s playing well right now. Just try to keep it going.”
Anaheim hosted Utah in its home opener on Oct. 16 and scored the tying goal with just over five minutes left before winning 5-4 in overtime.
The Ducks also have shown gradual improvement since that game, though they’re without one of their top playmakers in Trevor Zegras, who had surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his right knee on Dec. 12 and is expected to be sidelined another four weeks.
Anaheim posted an impressive 3-2 come-from-behind win against the visiting Winnipeg Jets on Wednesday but couldn’t repeat that performance against the visiting Avalanche on Friday, losing 4-2.
The Ducks continue to be one of the league’s biggest underperformers on the power play. They went 0-for-5 against the Avalanche to drop their success rate on the season to 14.3 percent, fourth lowest in the NHL.
“I think part of it is not having Zegras in our lineup,” said Ducks forward Alex Killorn, who scored one of the two goals against Colorado. “He’s great on the power play, but we’ve got to find ways to score whether it’s, you know, just getting more shots from the top, which can create more. But yeah, it can’t be a momentum-killer for us. Even if we don’t score, we have to kind of try to gain some momentum on it.”
Leo Carlsson scored the other goal against the Avalanche and continues to be the main playmaker for the Ducks in Zegras’ absence.
“He’s going to be a driver, he’s going to be one of those guys that’s pushing the pace,” Ducks coach Greg Cronin said of Carlsson. “A lot of his growth as a player is going to be in a third of the ice, whether he’s driving the net on a rush or he’s pulling the puck off the yellow and driving inside ice to shoot it in the offensive zone.”
–Field Level Media
