PITTSBURGH — The Ducks kicked off their five-game road trip with a thrilling victory.
Beckett Sennecke scored a short-handed goal with one-tenth of a second left in regulation to force overtime, Leo Carlsson scored in the shootout and the Ducks beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-3, on Tuesday night for their fifth win in seven games.
Ducks goaltender Ville Husso had just reached the bench for an extra skater, when the 19-year-old Sennecke drove to the net. He eluded three defenders and his shot deflected off the glove of Pittsburgh’s Erik Karlsson and into the net. A replay review confirmed the shot beat the buzzer.
Husso made 45 saves, including seven in overtime, and stopped all three shots in the shootout.
Jackson LaCombe and Troy Terry also scored for the Ducks, who have won three in a row. Noel Acciari, Tommy Novak and Anthony Mantha scored for the Penguins, and Arturs Silovs stopped 25 shots as Pittsburgh suffered its second consecutive shootout loss.
Mantha put the Penguins ahead 3-2 on a power-play goal with 3:55 remaining. Husso was called for holding the stick of Rutger McGroarty during a scramble in front of the crease and Mantha scored seven seconds into the man-advantage when his attempted pass through the crease went off the stick of Husso and into the net.
Sidney Crosby won a faceoff and assisted on Mantha’s goal for his 1,717th career point, moving him within five of Mario Lemieux’s franchise record.
Pittsburgh outshot the Ducks 16-8 in the opening period, but could only take a 1-0 lead on the first goal of the season by Acciari at 9:49.
The scoring play began with Acciari winning a faceoff in the Ducks’ zone. The puck went to teammate Connor Dewar, who swung and missed but then kicked the puck back to Acciari, who scored with a wrist shot through the legs of Ducks defenseman Pavel Mintyukov from the right circle.
The Ducks began to get their legs moving in the second period and tied it 1-1 at 5:19 when LaCombe scored from a nearly impossible angle. The Ducks won a faceoff in the Pittsburgh zone, and the puck went back to LaCombe along the wall. He drove to the net through the left circle and was nearly parallel with the goal line when he flicked a shot that squeezed through between Silovs’ head and the near post.
Terry put the Ducks ahead 2-1 later in the second when he secured a bouncing puck in the Pittsburgh zone and slammed it past Silovs from the bottom of the right circle.
The Penguins tied it 2-2 with 19 seconds left in the second period when Novak banked the puck off the back of Husso from below the goal line on the second rebound try, extending his goal streak to four games.
Sennecke assisted on LaCombe’s goal. The rookie has 26 points in 30 games, becoming the fastest teenager in Ducks history to reach 25 points. Mason McTavish took 40 games to reach the mark in 2022-23.
More to come on this story.
UP NEXT
The Ducks play at the New York Islanders on Thursday at 4 p.m. PT.