Maybe if the last three weeks had played out differently, the Anaheim Ducks’ return to the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in eight years would be filled with hope. After all, they talked before the season about how it was time, and they backed it up. Promise fulfilled.
This is supposed to be the moment when a franchise that’s been through a lot of low points can celebrate jarring loose a championship window that had been slammed shut. When Troy Terry, now the Ducks’ longest tenured player, can finally feel what playoff hockey is like.
“I mean, this is all new for me, so I’m just excited,” said Terry, who was a Black Ace for the club when it made its last playoff appearance in 2018. “I’m excited for our fan base. I’m excited for a lot of people in this organization and just around Orange County.
“It is nice to be set and know where we’re going. Obviously, they’ve got two of the best players in the world. They create their own challenges, and I’m excited. I think it’ll be a good series.”
“They” are Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl of the Edmonton Oilers, the Ducks’ opponent for the best-of-seven series that gets underway at Rogers Place on Monday. After Game 2 in Edmonton on Wednesday, the series shifts to Anaheim, where Honda Center will host its first playoff game since Game 2 of the 2018 first round against the San Jose Sharks.
Whether it will be a good series, much less a victorious one against the team that’s reached the last two Stanley Cup finals, will hinge on Anaheim repairing significant cracks in its defense, goaltending and special teams.
What the Ducks showed at the end of the regular season brought more concern than confidence. It has been a season of swings in qualifying with a 43-33-6 record and 92 points. There were a club-record 26 comeback victories, plenty of third-period rallies, all the dramatic overtime and shootout wins. It also masked their year of living dangerously. A 2-6-2 finish not only ended their bid to win the Pacific Division, but it may have revealed a team that isn’t ready for the playoff spotlight.
A 5-4 victory over the Nashville Predators in Thursday’s regular-season finale only reinforced the narrative they’ve built. The Ducks needed a third-period rally against the golf course-bound Predators to snap out of their late-season funk.
“It’s nice to win a game,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said postgame at Bridgestone Arena. “I know we lost a couple of close ones here in the last little bit. We had a little tough stretch going into the playoffs, and (it’s) nice having some positivity entering a real tough series ahead of us. Hey, we’re excited about playing playoff hockey.
“I think the last period we got ignited there. Let’s get excited about these playoffs. Don’t think it’s going to be an on-off switch come playoff time.”
The Ducks have played a wide-open brand of hockey this season, and Quenneville has, by and large, embraced that to maximize the roster’s speed and skill. It has resulted in significant improvement offensively. They scored 48 more goals than last season, jumping up from 30th in the NHL (2.65 goals per game) to 13th (3.23).
A balanced attack fueled the 265 goals that surpassed the previous club-best of 263 set in 2013-14. Nearly half of those came from their 22-and-younger contingent. Cutter Gauthier scored 41 goals — the most since Corey Perry scored 43 in 2013-14. Beckett Sennecke tied the New York Islanders’ Matthew Schaefer as the rookie goal scorer leader with 23. Leo Carlsson had 29. The three youngsters were their leading scorers and half of the six skaters who had 50 points or more.
Add in a defense that produced 46 goals, and the Ducks have the capacity to keep pace with the Oilers, who were sixth offensively with 282 goals. Jackson LaCombe had 10 goals and 58 points. The deadline acquisition of John Carlson has given Anaheim another pure puck-moving blueliner. Three of Carlson’s four goals came in his first career hat trick on April 9, and the 36-year-old has 14 points in his 16 games since coming from the Washington Capitals.
The fun-and-gun ways of the Ducks have also come with a cost on the defensive side, however. While they scored more goals than any other team in franchise history, the Ducks allowed the fourth-most goals with 288. High-event hockey is their calling card, and they’ve been burned by it as much as they’ve torched the opposition. Per Natural Stat Trick, Anaheim generated the fourth-most high-danger chances but also gave up the fifth-most.
Puck possession has improved under Quenneville. Advanced metrics are in their favor after years of letting teams drive the play. The Ducks outshoot the opposition on average, but they’re still guilty of letting teams get too many grade-A chances in the slot area. The biggest problem may be whether Lukas Dostal can raise his game to the level befitting a star No. 1 goalie.
In the first year of his five-year contract extension that now comes with a $6.5 million salary cap number, Dostal joined Guy Hebert, Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Jonas Hiller, Frederik Andersen and John Gibson in Ducks goalies with 30-win seasons. But though Dostal’s goals-against average (3.10) remained the same as last season, his save percentage has sagged, falling from .903 to .888.
More notably, Dostal’s goals saved above average, per MoneyPuck, dropped to minus-2.9 from the 14.3 of 2024-25 that made him a rising netminder with high-end No. 1 potential. The 25-year-old has given the Ducks key saves in moments when they’ve rallied for wins during this season’s successful stretches, but he’s also not given them enough stops when they’ve hit rough skids (an 0-8-1 stretch from Dec. 22 to Jan. 10 among them).
The Ducks now need Dostal to be at his best. They’ll need him to be better than Oilers goalie Connor Ingram, who has emerged as their go-to option. Ingram has been strong of late with three straight victorious starts of one goal allowed in each and a .924 SVP over his last eight appearances. The Oilers have also adopted a more defensive mindset after getting forward Jason Dickinson and defenseman Connor Murphy at the deadline.
“Whoever keeps them out of the net the best is going to be successful,” Quenneville said. “We know that we can outscore that team and outrun them. But we can play more patient against them. You know, we got a tall task ahead of us, knowing that the power play’s lethal and they’ve got some special players.”
One of those is Draisaitl. The Oilers’ superstar hasn’t played since March 15 because of a lower-body injury, but he has been skating and has progressed to day-to-day status. Edmonton is staying tight-lipped on his status, but the possibility of him being ready for Monday’s Game 1 as well as the rest of the series is increasing.
It makes for another obstacle for the Ducks. Zach Hyman also returned from injury in Edmonton’s season finale Thursday against Vancouver. With the ultimate conductor in McDavid, the Oilers have all the pieces for their lethal top-ranked power play back together, a major test for Anaheim’s 27th-ranked penalty kill.
The Ducks aren’t exactly blowing into these playoffs on a strong tailwind. They’re looking at a third-period rally to clinch third place in the Pacific Division as the stimulus to lock into a playoff mindset.
”I think we needed some positivity here,” Quenneville said. “… I think there might have been a little bit of complacency, knowing that it looked like we should have made the playoffs a while ago. And then it dragged on, and then the urgency all of a sudden was right in front of us.
“That little response here at the end helped, but at the same time, there’s another level that we’ve got to get to come when we start.”