ANAHEIM — They’ve been searching for it all year long. As it turns out, “it” was never there.
The Edmonton Oilers were eliminated by the Anaheim Ducks Thursday night, losing 5-2 in Game 6 of their Round 1 series, unable to flip a switch on a season-long malaise that left them an “average team” in the eyes of their captain.
It marked an end to a 2025-26 season that never really started for the Oilers, an 82-game search for some semblance of the game that had taken them to consecutive Stanley Cup Finals.
“We were an average team all year,” said Connor McDavid. “An average team with high expectations, you’re going to be disappointed.”
And disappointed they are, left in the slow lane by the big, speedy Ducks. Anaheim was simply too much for this version of the Oilers — throughout the series and certainly in Game 6 — in a series that ended with the Ducks scoring eight times on 16 power-play opportunities.
“That's a real hockey team over there. They have some good players,” observed Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “But at the end of the day we’ve got to find ways to keep the puck out of our net. It's not just a couple of guys, it's everyone.
“It's a bit of a theme through the season."
“They played very fast and we weren’t very fast,” added McDavid. “We weren’t very good on the penalty kill. Our power play didn’t get off to a good start but found its way into the series.
“But we struggled on the PK all year, too. We’ve been searching for consistency there, too.”
If you earn your puck luck in this game, then it was all Duck luck Thursday, as Anaheim got two goals from two fortunate deflections in Period 1 to break it open early. The Ducks led wire to wire, did not give the Oilers a single power play, and held McDavid pointless in Game 6.
In the end, McDavid limped through a largely ineffective series. He was injured in Game 1 when he got tangled up with teammate Mattias Ekholm, stopped practising, and posted just six points and a minus-8 in the six games.
“Too hurt, too soon,” said McDavid of the Oilers limpy, gimpy roster. “The first round is always tough, it’s always chaotic. It’s tough to play through things so early on, as many guys did in here.”
“Leon was injured for the last four or five weeks heading into the playoffs,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch. “For him to come back after that long stretch, I thought he played really well.
“We've got some guys with some fractures that were playing through things that made it really difficult to play at their best. But I certainly love their effort and how they dug in.”
“Our centres — one, two and three — are playing through stuff,” said Draisaitl, who forgot about Adam Henrique, Edmonton’s 4C who was hurt in Game 1 and never returned. “But at the end of the day you have to find ways to win games, in any way. You have to grind one out; you have to defend one out.
“Injuries, they suck and it hit us at a bad time certainly. But they were the better team.”
Like their captain, the beat up and aging Oilers simply looked like a team that’s played too much hockey in the last two springs, the fatigue exacerbated by a compressed Olympic schedule during which they never seemed to catch their collective breath.
No team has played more hockey than this one over the past few seasons, though to a man, the players we spoke to post-game refuted that angle.
“I don’t know,” said Draisaitl. “You strap your skates on for every playoff game and you try to go out and do your best and try to win it. Obviously we fell short.
“As much as it hurts, I think they were just the better team.”
So they’ll go into the summer and get the rest required for a fulsome Stanley Cup charge again next year. But there will be change — around an awful penalty-killing unit, among their seven unrestricted free agents, and who knows where else.
Starting now, the Anaheim Ducks are the team to beat in the Pacific. It’s Edmonton that will have to figure out how to stay relevant out West, as their McDavid-era competitive window begins to close.
“At the end of the day they were just better than us,” Draisaitl said. “For sure, we never really found what you need to find at this time of year especially to go all the way.
“In my opinion, just not good enough.”
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