OILERS STILL KICKING
EDMONTON ROMPS PAST ANAHEIM
Team shrugs off heart-breaking loss to force Game 7
The Edmonton Oilers are forcing the Anaheim Ducks to face their Game 7 playoff demons.
Their Western Conference semifinal is going the distance after Edmonton’s decisive 7-1 victory Sunday.
The winner of Wednesday’s Game 7 in Anaheim meets the Nashville Predators in the conference final.
Leon Draisaitl led the Oilers with a hat trick with Mark Letestu scoring twice for the hosts. Edmonton also got goals from Zach Kassian and Anton Slepychev in front a euphoric wall of orange at Rogers Place.
Oilers goaltender Cam Talbot turned away 34-of-35 shots for the win.
“Obviously the season was on the line and we all had to step it up a notch and the whole group did,” Draisaitl said.
Edmonton had sprinted to a sixgoal lead by the first minute of the second period before the Ducks countered with a lone goal from Rickard Rakell.
The Oilers scoring three goals on their first six shots prompted Anaheim to replace John Gibson with Jonathan Bernier, who stopped 24-of-28 shots in relief.
Momentum has swung to Edmonton, while the Ducks are under pressure to reverse a trend. Anaheim has lost a Game 7 at home each of the last four years.
The Ducks were eliminated in the first rounds of 2016 (Nashville) and 2013 (Detroit), the second round of 2014 (Los Angeles) and the third round of 2015 (Chicago) in seventh games at the Honda Center.
What’s more, the Ducks led each of those series 3-2 before back-toback losses ended their seasons.
“Even for us to come out in the second period and get that sixth goal, that was big,” Letestu said. “It showed we weren’t going to get back on our heels and possibly let them get back into the hockey game.
“We’re not going to blow teams out like this all the time. We expect Game 7 to be a lot tighter.”
The Oilers won twice in Anaheim to open this series and narrowly lost Game 5 there in double overtime.
Edmonton’s last Game 7 was the 2006 Stanley Cup final, which they lost 3-1 to the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, N.C.
Rogers Place was highly sensitive to officiating Sunday given the perceived injustice of allowing Friday’s tying goal to withstand a goaltender interference challenge.
The Oilers were up 3-0 and on the cusp of taking a 3-2 series lead home when the Ducks became just the second team in NHL playoff history to erase a three-goal deficit in the last four minutes of regulation.
Ducks centre Ryan Kesler had his glove on Talbot’s pad when Rakell put a backhand between his pads to tie it with 15 seconds remaining. Corey Perry then scored the doubleovertime winner.
So, the Oilers were a team on a mission in Game 6.
“We knew we had to keep our foot on the gas pedal and the hockey gods gave us a chance in Game 7,” Milan Lucic said.
Draisaitl completed his hat trick on a give-and-go with Lucic at 15:27 of the second period, when Kesler was serving a roughing minor.
Draisaitl has a teamleading four goals and nine assists in the series.
Edmonton’s blue line ran with reinforcements as Eric Gryba and Griffin Reinhart drew in for Andrej Sekura and Oscar Klefbom.
Sekura played less than two minutes in Game 5 because of an apparent leg injury. Klefbom took a shot in the chest and missed half a period, but returned to that game.
Klefbom left warmup early Sunday and was replaced in the lineup by Reinhart.