ANAHEIM — It looked like last spring. And then all of a sudden, it didn’t anymore.
For 20 minutes on Wednesday, the Anaheim Ducks did pretty much anything they wanted to the Edmonton Oilers, like they had in that six-game Round 1 win of a season ago. The Ducks took a 2-0 lead on a perfect power play and absolute five-on-five domination against an Oilers team that looked old, slow and inferior.
Truly, the young, big and fast Ducks had picked up where they’d left off. And the Oilers looked like what McDavid so famously described as “an average team with high expectations.”
Then, at the intermission, Mike Babcock asked his team a question: “Does anybody feel good about themselves right now?”
“(Anaheim) won every battle, every race, every competitive part of the game in the first period,” Babcock said after a 5-2 win at Anaheim. “Then we talked as a group that we needed to be more competitive. Then, when we got competitive, things turned our way.”
Oh boy, did they ever.
Evan Bouchard drifted home a shot just 11 seconds into the second period, and before the shift was over, Ducks goalie Lukas Dostal was forced to make a wild toe save on Leon Draisaitl to protect Anaheim’s 2-1 lead.
Then Kasperi Kapanen buried a power-play one-timer at 6:30. Tie game.
Then Bouchard again. Then Vasily Podkolzin. Then Connor McDavid on a last-minute wrister that would have Dostal watching from the bench after Ville Husso relieved him for the third period.
Edmonton pushed back, and for one night at least, Anaheim did not have an answer. It was the old dog teaching the young dog that he still fancies himself an Alpha, and then showing him why he still thinks that way.
“When you feel that you don't have your legs, you feel like you're getting pushed into your own end by their speed a little bit,” began Leon Draisaitl, who had four assists in that five-goal second period. “We're all men; we all want to be better. We want to be at our best. We pushed back hard and we did it the right way.”
The Oilers dominated Anaheim for the final 40 minutes, and have now not allowed an even-strength goal in two straight games. A game that started with two Anaheim power-play goals, ended with the Oilers killing off the final five Ducks man advantages — including a lengthy six-on-three with the goalie pulled late in the game.
“Sometimes when you play a team in the playoffs, you need to kind of feel them out a little bit,” reasoned defenceman Mattias Ekholm. “We weren't sharp, we weren't skating… I don't know if we respected them (too much). Then after the first, we're like, what can possibly go more wrong? So we just went out there and started working.”
Bouchard was at the heart of it all, with two goals and three points on a plus-4 night. His game has been immaculate through four games, and nearly everything he shoots finds the back of the net.
The Oilers defenceman leads the NHL with six goals, trails only McDavid in the scoring race, 12 points to 11, and has almost twice as many points as the next closest defenceman (Mikhail Sergachev with six).
Meanwhile, the Oilers, playing without half of their top-six forwards with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Zach Hyman and Matt Savoie all injured, have collected seven of eight points through their first four games, and likely just beat the toughest opponent to open this three-game California road trip.
“We got really quality goaltending (from Devon Levi), our penalty kill — that started out crazy — was excellent for us, and in the end it turns out to be a good night for our team,” said Babcock. “For our group to be good, we're going to have to push each other to be ultra-competitive. We had that in us tonight. In the first period, we didn't, but in the end, we did.”
Levi clearly outplayed Dostal, something that didn’t happen last spring for Edmonton. The young goalie might be the brightest story of them all for Edmonton, whose goaltending woes are well chronicled.
Meanwhile, it was the first loss of the young season for Anaheim (2-1-0). It was a sight to see how dominant the Ducks were for 20 minutes, and how the Oilers turned those tables for the final 40.
“In the three games, this is the first time we looked like we were in the watching mode instead of the anticipating and the forcing mode,” said head coach Joel Quenneville. “We got a market correction today. Let’s see how we handle that, which is ‘Let’s respond in the correct way.”
