from Eric Duhatschek of the Globe and Mail,

For most of five days, Calgary Flames goaltender Jonas Hiller was talking about the challenges of playing his former team, the Anaheim Ducks – and to be fair, he stressed how difficult the task would be. The Ducks are big, fast, mean, skilled. They’d swept the Winnipeg Jets out of the playoffs in the opening round. They were hungry, motivated, a well-rested team.

It wouldn’t be easy to play the prohibitive favourites in the series.

But in Hiller’s wildest dreams, he probably couldn’t have imagined a result quite this grim. The Ducks scored three times on 14 shots in just over 22 minutes – and Hiller’s night was over just like that.

Anaheim kept pouring it on against his replacement Karri Ramo too and in the end, rolled to a ridiculously easy 6-1 victory Thursday night in the best-of-seven Pacific Division final. The Flames have two days to lick their wounds before the series resumes Sunday night in Anaheim – and they’ll need a complete reset to put the memory of Thursday’s nightmarish performance behind them.

“Everybody’s got to get better, me included,” said Hiller. “They outworked us tonight. They were hungrier than we were. That was always our staple – to outwork our opponent. We don’t have the skills to let them outwork us and think we’re going to win. The good thing is, it doesn’t really matter if we lose 1-0 or 6-1, it just counts as one win – and we’ve got a chance to be better next game.”

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