EDMONTON, Alberta – Some notes, quotes and other musings from the Ducks’ 2-1 win over Edmonton on Saturday night …

— On Friday, it was a team that had enough and used its anger productively. Less than a full day later, it was about not going back to square one.

The Ducks are supposed to beat the Oilers, a team that’s spinning its wheels as it again heads toward the draft lottery. But this is the NHL and even the bad teams can rise up on a given night. Especially when this one figured to show more than it did in a dreadful 4-0 loss to Minnesota the night before.

And the Ducks knew that. Edmonton gave a much better effort. But they couldn’t afford to give away all they gained in a stirring third-period comeback in Calgary that propelled them to a 6-3 win to halt a 3-6-1 slide.

“I was thinking all day that it was a really big game,” Coach Bruce Boudreau said. “Especially with us going home and having to play Detroit, Ottawa and L.A., teams that have been playing pretty well. It was a big win for us. It wasn’t pretty.”

It wasn’t. Unable to blow it open early after a goal by Francois Beauchemin just 45 seconds in, the Ducks settled into a grind-it-out affair and got the winner from Ryan Getzlaf in the third. And it was much more of the game this big, sometimes-brawny team needs to play.

With a tough slate ahead at Honda Center this week, the Ducks left out of Alberta with two wins in their collective pocket.

“I think we all knew that we couldn’t win one, lose one,” Ducks goalie John Gibson said. “So I think we all knew that this was a big game heading into it. We wanted to start building up the wins again.”

Just when it appeared they were stumbling back to the congested pack in the Pacific Division, the Ducks pushed their lead back to 12 points over Vancouver. The Canucks, Kings and Flames all have a game or two in hand but the division lead remains the largest in the NHL.

“Any points now are big,” Getzlaf said. “No one’s going to roll over and give you anything down the stretch here and you’re going to have to earn it. Tonight, I thought we did a lot of good things. We had a few breakdowns here and there.

“Most of all, we kept everything to the outside and our goaltender played good.”

— Speaking of that goaltender, Gibson has now made five straight starts and won three of them. Unless a setback occurs, Frederik Andersen figures to come back fully recovered from his neck soreness sometime this week. But the Ducks have a pretty warm hand going at the moment.

Gibson stayed sharp with 26 saves after playing well in Calgary. The biggest development was that it came on back-to-back nights, the first time he’s done it at the NHL level.

He has done in Norfolk, even recently before being called up when Andersen got injured by the wayward crossbar in Tampa Bay. But Gibson admitted that there is a difference playing two straight nights against bigger, faster, better players.

“I think you’re just fatigued,” he said. “We had a tough schedule, playing last night, travel and then a 5 o’clock game. It’s a little bit earlier than usual so I think we’re all a little bit tired.

“We didn’t want to use that as an excuse. We wanted to come out and put two together.”

The groin injury that sidelined him for two months now appears to be a memory. Gibson has shown in flashes both last year and this the kind of potential that has many convinced he can be a No. 1 goalie for a decade. Now it’s about building the consistency needed to do that.

“I think that we are all expected to play as hard as we can back to back,” defenseman Ben Lovejoy said. “And we expected John to do the same thing. He’s an awesome goalie. We love playing in front of him.

“He did it. He was John Gibson tonight. It was awesome.”

— The Ducks weren’t without their share of hairy moments. None stood out more than when Lovejoy had to scramble back as the only defenseman to do his best to break up a developing grade-A scoring chance by Edmonton rookie Ryan Hamilton.

“You try and do as much as you can to make it a two on two with your goalie,” Lovejoy said. “I was able to get him wide enough that John was able to make a pretty routine save.”

How do the Oilers get a momentary two-on-none and then a two-on-one? Some of the Ducks decide to make a line change in the waning seconds. And Boudreau let his team have it, even when victorious.

“It’s less than 10 seconds to go and we’re changing, like we did when Tampa had a breakaway,” he said. “I don’t get it. Thank God we did a good job holding on or I would have been a lot madder.”

Moments later, Boudreau tried to look at it philosophically. Mistakes are made but this was one that left him befuddled.

“Go figure,” Boudreau said. “I don’t know. I’m sure I made a few of them when I played. It’s just like you don’t think of that. You think you never made a mistake when you played. Obviously I did. But you can’t understand those changes.”

— Like his other young cohorts, Rickard Rakell hasn’t lit the lamp as much as he’d like. Very quietly, Rakell has racked up 18 assists in his 49 games as he’s trying to put a vise grip on the third-line center job that was left open for him to grab at the start of the season.

Rakell won the faceoff with Edmonton ace Boyd Gordon that allowed Beauchemin to tee up his quick snap shot from the point that flew past Oilers goalie Ben Scrivens. Gordon wins 55.9 percent of his draws, making him a top-10 player in that category.

At 45.4 percent, Rakell still needs work in that area to remain a pivot. But it is those things that allow 2011 first-round pick continuing his progress toward becoming an impact player.