Chris Kreider, Troy Terry and Leo Carlsson all scored once in three-point outings as the Anaheim Ducks advanced to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs with a 5-2 home-ice victory over the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 on Thursday.
Cutter Gauthier collected one goal and one assist while Ryan Poehling added a goal for Anaheim, which claimed the Western Conference quarterfinal series 4-2. Goaltender Lukas Dostal made 25 saves as the Ducks recorded their first postseason series victory since 2017.
Reflecting on the series, Terry said, “The first period of the first game, you could see the nerves, but that first game was huge for us. We didn’t win, but we proved to ourselves we could play with that team.
“To beat that team is pretty special.”
The Ducks’ opponent in the Western Conference semifinals will be the winner of the series between the Golden Knights and Utah Mammoth, which Vegas leads 3-2.
Connor Murphy and Vasily Podkolzin tallied for the Oilers, who lost in the Stanley Cup Final in each of the previous two seasons. Goalie Connor Ingram stopped 26 shots.
“Never really found what you need to find this time of year, especially to go all the way,” Edmonton star Leon Draisaitl said. “In my opinion, just not good enough. … They were the better team.”
For the first time in the series, Anaheim opened the scoring. Poehling’s fourth tally of the playoffs came just before the midway point of the first period. After the line’s workmanlike effort to gain possession of the puck in the offensive zone, John Carlson sent a point shot that ricocheted off a defender and then the back of Poehling’s leg before going into the net.
Kreider doubled the lead four minutes later with his first of the series, a one-timer off the rush that found the mark on the short side to make his 35th birthday all the better.
“Our guys played our best game of the year at the biggest time of the year,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said on TNT. “That’s a great sign.”
Murphy put the Oilers on the board 91 seconds later with a tap-in tally during a scramble. However, Gauthier restored Anaheim’s two-goal edge with his team’s eighth power-play goal of the series, benefitting when his shot redirected off a defender’s stick and into the net at 16:50 of the opening frame.
Anaheim scored with the man-advantage in all six games.
“We knew coming into it, we like our best game,” Terry said. “I thought our special teams were good, our back end played great on their big guys. We just got timely scoring and good goaltending.”
Less than one minute after the Oilers had a goal waved off, Terry made it a 4-1 game by burying a shot from the slot with 46.5 seconds remaining in the second period.
Podkolzin’s goal 73 seconds into the third period — a shot was going wide of the net but banked off Podkolzin’s leg and into the cage — provided a spark for a possible Oilers comeback.
However, Carlsson quashed the rally hopes by scoring an empty-net goal with 3:34 to go.
Oilers captain Connor McDavid said, “We’ve been searching for consistency all year. Obviously we didn’t find it in the playoffs.
“We were an average team all year. An average team with high expectations, you’re gonna be disappointed. We expected to have a longer run than we did.”
–Field Level Media
