Oilers flip script on Ducks with dominant final 40: 'We got competitive' |
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........