Dead Ducks?

Scott Niedermayer sat alone on a bench in the Ducks locker room after Anaheim's pivotal loss in Game 2 on Saturday night. With a scrum of reporters huddled around Teemu Selanne to his left and Jean-Sebastien Giguere to his right, Niedermayer was lost in deep thought and didn't take notice of his teammates dealing with questions that had no answers.

Niedermayer slowly removed his left skate, then his right one. He carefully inspected the right skate, one side and then the other, as if he was checking out a new sports car to determine if it was dent-free. After scraping at a couple of the rivets on the bottom of the skate, he gently placed the skate on the floor, shook his head and quietly walked out of the room.

A penny for his thoughts.

Niedermayer has won four Stanley Cups – three with New Jersey and one with Anaheim last spring. The veteran defenseman knows exactly what kind of sacrifice, what kind of dedication and just how much passion it takes to climb that mountain.

The reason behind the bad penalties in Game 1 and the mental mistakes in Game 2 is the missing ingredient of mental preparation. The Ducks just didn't have it Thursday and Saturday, and if they don’t find it in time for Tuesday night's critical Game 3, we're looking at a new champion by the end of this two-month tournament.

"We are all guilty of not playing as good as we can right now," Giguere said. "All together it's pretty ugly out there."

First off, let's not take anything away from the Dallas Stars, who have taken a page from the Jacques Lemaire style of coaching. Stars bench boss Dave Tippett doesn't get the credit he deserves, not only for the job he did preparing his team for two solid road games at the outset of the series, but for the continued work he's done with the franchise.

These are not the Stars with Ed Belfour, Derian Hatcher, Joe Nieuwendyk, Brett Hull, Mike Keane & Co. The only holdovers from that 1999 Stanley Cup championship roster include Mike Modano, Jere Lehtinen and Sergei Zubov, who probably won't even appear in this series. Dallas may have won only two playoff rounds since losing the 2000 Cup Finals, but they haven't exactly fallen off the map like some teams that experience this kind of transition.

"We had a big character-building game to finish the season and we gained a lot of trust with each other," Dallas captain Brenden Morrow said of a fight-filled scrum with San Jose. "We've gotten our break on the power play and our special teams have been the difference so far in the series."

The casual fan would have trouble recognizing a lot of the fresh faces, but that hasn't stopped the Stars from being patient early in games, waiting for their opponent to make a mistake and to pounce. Smart, calculated, measured decisions and channeled emotion. That's winning hockey, and Dallas definitely deserves to be up 2-0 in the best-of-seven Western Conference quarterfinal.

But we've seen how the Ducks play hockey in the past – hard, tough, in your face and fast – yet we haven't seen even close to it so far this postseason. How surprising was it to see, during a 4-0 loss in Game 1 and a 5-2 setback in Game 2, hardly a scrum, barely a tussle in the third periods when the games were decided?

Anaheim can talk about tightening up the penalty kill and playing with better discipline, but what the players are really saying is they have to be in a better frame of mind. And the question is, can they just turn it on now when they need it most?

Maybe the Ducks can be excused. The length of an NHL season is such that finalists from one year are lucky to get off to a fast start the next. Anaheim followed what Carolina and Edmonton experienced at the start of the previous season – a grand stumble out of the gate. Of course, having to open camp a week-to-10 days earlier than 28 other teams in preparation for a regular-season pair of games in London didn't help.

There was the uncertainty, at least to the outside world, whether Niedermayer and Selanne would return after they decided at the outset of the season to "ponder" retirement. Then, just as the two veterans returned to the fold along with Samuel Pahlsson feeling healthy, the Ducks found that extra gear.

Anaheim went from a bubble team at 27-22-7 on Feb. 2 to 47-27-8 with a 20-5-1 sprint to the finish. But maybe the Ducks emptied their emotional tank en route to the 102-point season? Maybe they gasped a sigh of relief once they reached the finishing line, confusing it for the fact it's actually the starting line?

For what it's worth, Anaheim's season and pursuit of the league's first back-to-back titles since Detroit did it in 1997-98 is down to 60, 70, 80 or however many minutes it takes Tuesday to secure a Game 3 victory. Without it the Ducks' hopes, along with their passion, will be lost.