Oilers lay a thumping on Ducks
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 on Sunday. The winner of Wednesday’s Game 7 in Anaheim, Calif., 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 Slepyshev in front of a euphoric wall of orange at Rogers Place.
Oilers goaltender Cam Talbot turned away 34 of 35 shots for the win.
Edmonton had sprinted to a six-goal lead by the first minute of the second period before the Ducks countered with a lone goal from Rickard Rakell.
The Oilers scored three goals on their first six shots, prompting 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-to-back losses ended their seasons.
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 on Friday 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.
Draisaitl completed his Game 6 hat trick on a giveand-go with Milan Lucic at 15:27 of the second period when Ryan Kesler was serving a roughing minor. Draisaitl has a team-leading four goals and nine assists in the series.
On a cross-ice feed from Corey Perry, Rakell caught Talbot out of his net to score for the Ducks at 8:56.
Slepyshev extended the host team’s lead to six goals 45 seconds into the period on an odd-man rush with Patrick Maroon.