Kasperi Kapanen netted his second goal of the game with 1:54 left in the third period and the Edmonton Oilers recovered for a 4-3 win against the visiting Anaheim Ducks in Game 1 of a Western Conference first-round series on Monday.
Kapanen scored with a one-timer from the slot off a feed from behind the Anaheim net by Vasily Podkolzin.
Jason Dickinson also scored two goals and Connor Ingram made 25 saves for the Oilers, who gave up three goals in the second period to surrender a 2-0 lead.
“You want your goalie to make big saves and he did,” Dickinson said of Ingram. “He was awesome.”
Dickinson added of the Ducks, “All year, they’ve been a team that just never goes away. You can never count them out. You can’t let off the gas at all.”
Podkolzin, Jake Walman and Leon Draisaitl notched two assists apiece for Edmonton.
Draisaitl, who had 97 points in 65 games this season, had missed the final 14 games of the regular season with a lower-body injury.
“I felt OK,” Draisaitl said. “Certainly going to take a couple games to really be myself and really trust myself again, but for a start, I thought it was OK.”
Troy Terry had two goals and an assist, Leo Carlsson added a goal and an assist and Lukas Dostal made 30 saves for the Ducks in their first playoff game in eight years.
“There were lots of positives for us,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said. “We had a few mistakes early, but overall I liked our game. We had the game where you wanted it at 3-2, and then an unlucky break and they are coming again.”
Game 2 of the best-of-seven series is Wednesday in Edmonton.
Walman made a blue line-to-blue line stretch pass to Dickinson as he slipped behind rookie defenseman Tyson Hinds, and Dickinson got Dostal to bite on a fake before shooting the puck into the open side of the net for a 1-0 lead at 17:21 of the first.
The Oilers doubled the lead to 2-0 after Ducks forward Chris Kreider turned the puck over coming through the neutral zone. Draisaitl centered the puck to Kapanen, whose initial shot from the high slot was saved by Dostal, but Kapanen knocked down the rebound and shot it in from the side of the crease at 18:21 of the first.
Edmonton outshot Anaheim 5-0 through the first 6 1/2 minutes before finishing with a 14-4 edge in the first period.
The Ducks scored 19 seconds into the second period when a rebound came out diagonally to Terry and he fired it back into the net from the right circle.
The Ducks were unable to capitalize on the first power play of the game, but they scored 19 seconds after it expired. Another rebound came out diagonally, this time to Carlsson, who put it into the net to tie it 2-2 at 4:38 of the middle period.
“Falling down 2-0 is not where you want to be, especially at this time of year,” Anaheim defenseman John Carlson said. “We battled back like (we) have all year. It’s good to have that confidence, knowing that we have that.”
Anaheim was on its second power play when Terry scored with a wrist shot from above the left circle with help from a screen by Kreider to grab a 3-2 lead at 14:29 of the second period.
Ducks defenseman Radko Gudas lost his footing while defending a rush, allowing Dickinson to score on a rebound and tie it 3-3 at 11:30 of the third.
–Field Level Media
