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Duck, Duck, Goals!
May 1, 2026
Posted 1 hour ago by
There is an understandable tendency to make Oilers losses about the Oilers rather than about the team that beat them. After being eliminated by the Anaheim Ducks in Game 6 on Thursday, Connor McDavid put a damper on the rhetorical appeal of that angle by summing up Edmonton's season so succinctly and so accurately that there's not really much to be said beyond it: When you're an average team with high expectations, McDavid said, you're going to be disappointed.
Opponents matter. After four straight first rounds of drawing and beating the Kings, who could euphemistically be described as a team that focuses at both ends on goal prevention, this time Edmonton got the Ducks. Anaheim is young, fast, and high-scoring, and the old, banged-up, and defensively suspect Oilers simply could not hang. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins directed the praise where it belongs: That's a real hockey team over there. It's a shame they hired Joel Quenneville, because the Ducks are otherwise a pretty easy team to root for. They are unpolished and chaotic; they seem to treat their defensemen like forwards who just play back a little; I'm not sure they're aware it's legal to employ a goaltender with a save percentage that starts with 9.
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