OTTAWA, Ontario — Coming off an ugly loss in Montreal, a game against Mason McTavish’s hometown team turned out to be the perfect tonic for the Ducks.
McTavish scored twice to help the Ducks beat the Ottawa Senators, 5-1, on Thursday night.
The 21-year-old McTavish, who has 15 goals this season, grew up in nearby Carp, Ontario.
Frank Vatrano, Pavel Mintyukov and Cam Fowler also scored for the Ducks (19-32-2), who rebounded from a 5-0 loss to the Canadiens on Tuesday night.
“We were pretty bad (in Montreal), really bad actually,” McTavish said. “I thought we played a lot better today and it was a good response.”
McTavish had plenty of friends and family cheering him on and didn’t disappoint. In addition to having an impact on the scoresheet, McTavish was physical and made his presence known all game.
“He’s a real honest self-evaluator,” Ducks coach Greg Cronin said. “He had a really, kind of tough game (Tuesday) and I know (General Manager) Pat Verbeek talked to him after the game in terms of how he had to play to have an identity during the course of a game.
“He’s a big, thick kid, he’s 210 pounds and he shouldn’t be invisible in any game and that was the message Pat gave him. I thought he was really good tonight.”
Ducks goaltender John Gibson stopped all 15 shots he faced through two periods, while Lukas Dostal made 18 saves in relief in the third period.
Dostal stepped in for Gibson to start the third period after Gibson exited with an upper-body injury. Gibson was run over by Senators forward Drake Batherson and Ducks defenceman Ilya Lyubushkin early in the second period and was knocked over a second time later in the frame.
There was no update on his status following the game.
McTavish scored his second of the night 2:18 into the third after Troy Terry deked Thomas Chabot and found McTavish at the side of the net to make it 4-0.
Claude Giroux got the Senators (22-26-2) on the board at 4:43 of the third after stealing the puck and beating Dostal blocker side with a wrister.
Fowler made it 5-1 at 9:23 of the frame with a power-play goal. With an assist on the play, his second of the night, Vatrano tied his career high of 41 points (23 goals, 18 assists), that he set last year.
The Ducks tripled their lead in the second period.
Vatrano made it a 2-0 game when he scored a power-play goal off a one-timer with 2:35 remaining. McTavish followed that up by beating Joonas Korpisalo to the far corner for his 14th of the season with 1:01 left in the frame.
“It just seemed like we were disconnected all over the ice and they played well,” Ottawa defenseman Jakob Chychrun said. “So, they definitely deserve that one and we did not.”
The Ducks opened the scoring with Mintyukov scoring on a Terry rebound at 9:19 of the first.
Korpisalo made 15 saves for the Senators, who had won four in a row.
“I just didn’t think our compete level was high enough,” Senators coach Jacques Martin said. “But give them credit, they outworked us, they worked hard, they were on the puck. We didn’t have time and space.
“It’s a team that obviously, they had lost badly the last game, had a hard practice yesterday and they got the message. We had a good stretch going, so I think that we’ve just got to regroup.”
UP NEXT
The Ducks play at Toronto on Saturday at 4 p.m. PT.