2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs: Oilers vs. Ducks series preview

Apr 17, 2026, 15:16 EDT

2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs: Oilers vs. Ducks series preview

Credit: Perry Nelson-Imagn Images

Edmonton Oilers: 2nd in Pacific Division, 93 points

Anaheim Ducks: 3rd in Pacific Division, 92 points

Schedule (ET)

Game #	Date	Game	Time (ET)
1	Monday, April 20	Anaheim at Edmonton	10:00 PM
2	Wednesday, April 22	Anaheim at Edmonton	10:00 PM
3	Friday, April 24	Edmonton at Anaheim	10:00 PM
4	Sunday, April 26	Edmonton at Anaheim	9:30 PM
5	Tuesday, April 28	Anaheim at Edmonton*	TBD
6	Thursday, April 30	Edmonton at Anaheim*	TBD
7	Saturday, May 2	Anaheim at Edmonton*	TBD

*If Necessary

The Skinny

For the fifth consecutive year, the Oilers will face a Southern California team in the first round of the playoffs. But this time, the Hockey Gods decided to spare us from the slog of yet another Edmonton vs. Los Angeles Kings matchup, instead conjuring up the first Oilers/Ducks series since 2017.

Did you know that the Oilers haven’t won their division since 1987? It’s been nearly 40 years since they finished atop the table in either the Smythe, Northwest, Pacific, or North. This time around, they wound up just two points back of the Vegas Golden Knights in the “pillow fight” that was the 2025-26 Pacific Division playoff race.

Get this: Vegas, Edmonton, Anaheim, and L.A. each made the playoffs with fewer than 96 points, which was the playoff cutoff in the Western Conference last year. These Oilers may not be quite the same team that reached the Stanley Cup Final in 2024 and 2025, but they still have six-time Art Ross Trophy winner Connor McDavid and Norris Trophy candidate Evan Bouchard in their corner.

The Ducks also had a pretty good shot at the division title this year, but they ultimately fell short after the Golden Knights’ late-season surge. Under new head coach Joel Quenneville, the Ducks appear to have finally taken a step forward in their rebuild, with young guns Cutter Gauthier, Leo Carlsson, Beckett Sennecke, Jackson LaCombe, and Lukas Dostal leading the way. With all due respect to the Kings, it’s been a long time since the Oilers have gone up against a team with this much young star power in the first round of the playoffs — and Quenneville is certainly no Jim Hiller, either. Seeing as this is Anaheim’s first playoff berth since 2018, there’s no world in which they won’t be the underdogs against a very seasoned Oilers group, but they still have legit upset potential.

The last time these two teams met in the playoffs, it was a wily Ducks group nearing the end of the Ryan Getzlaf era that prevailed over McDavid and his band of young upstarts. This time, the roles may be reversed, but will the outcome change?

Head to Head

Edmonton: 2-1-0
Anaheim: 1-2-0

The Oilers and Ducks played twice in Edmonton and once in Anaheim this year, with the home team winning all three games. And as you might expect from two of the more defensively porous teams in the Western Conference, it was a pretty high-scoring season series. The Oilers won 7-4 and 4-2 in Edmonton; the Ducks won 6-5 at the Honda Center on Feb. 25. All three games were decided in regulation.

Top Five Scorers

Edmonton

Connor McDavid, 138 pts
Leon Draisaitl, 97 pts
Evan Bouchard, 94 pts
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, 55 pts
Zach Hyman, 53 pts

Anaheim

Cutter Gauthier, 69 pts
Leo Carlsson, 67 pts
Beckett Sennecke, 60 pts
Jackson LaCombe, 58 pts
Troy Terry, 57 pts

Offense

Back in the 2022-23 season, the Oilers led the NHL with 325 goals. In 2023-24, they finished fourth; the following year, they fell to 11th. This season, the Oilers rebounded to seventh, largely despite their surprisingly mediocre chance-generation metrics, which put them far closer to the middle of the pack. We’ve become so accustomed to seeing the Oilers underperform for stretches, largely due to an unsustainably low PDO, before roaring back to the mean and looking nigh-unbeatable for weeks or months on end. This season, they started average, stayed average, and finished average.

The main knock against the Oilers has always been that they’re too top-heavy, with the sentiment being that if a team can just shut down Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl — as the Florida Panthers did in the deciding games of each of the last two Stanley Cup Finals — they’d be able to win. But in retrospect, the 2024 and 2025 Oilers rosters look downright balanced compared to the 2026 Oilers. These Oilers desperately need Matt Savoie, Jack Roslovic, and Vasily Podkolzin to form a strong secondary firmament behind McDavid, Zach Hyman, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins on the front lines, particularly if Draisaitl isn’t ready to start the series. McDavid is coming off a 138-point season and is more than capable of picking apart the Ducks on his own, but he just can’t do it all for four consecutive rounds.

Anaheim may not have a singularly electrifying offensive presence like McDavid, but their offensive attack was truly formidable in 2025-26. They finished third in the league in expected goals, total shots, and total 5-on-5 scoring chances, though they wound up with the 10th-most goals, largely due to their below-average power play. The Oilers ended up beating the Ducks’ power play conversion rate by a full 12 percent in 2025-26, with their top-ranked PP chugging along at 30.6 compared to Anaheim’s 18.6.

The Ducks have reasonably impressive forward depth. Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier look like they’ll be one of the most dangerous duos in the Western Conference for many years. Beckett Sennecke has fully convinced most fans that he was the right pick at No. 3 in 2024. Chris Kreider reached the 50-point mark in his first year in Anaheim, while Troy Terry, Mikael Granlund, Ryan Poehling, and Alex Killorn did well in their respective roles. The one real question mark has to do with Mason McTavish, who had a more difficult time adjusting to Quenneville’s system than most of his contemporaries, but he should still be an asset if he matches up against Edmonton’s third or fourth lines.

Defense

The Oilers were much more of a low-event team than usual in 2025-26, and while their offensive output took a hit as a result, their defensive metrics were a bit better than in the past. Unfortunately, due in large part to their shoddy goaltending (more on that later), the Oilers still allowed the seventh-most goals against in the league — Anaheim was the only playoff team to allow more — but the fundamentals weren’t bad, and if they can get some more saves, things could turn around in a hurry.

This season has been the best one yet for Evan Bouchard, whose propensity for making One Big Mistake has largely overshadowed his excellence in recent years — at least, in the eyes of many fans. Bouchard played the biggest minutes of his career in 2025-26 and performed better than ever, scoring 21 goals and 94 points while dominating in transition and even killing penalties. He’s been fantastic, genuinely Norris-caliber, and we’ve all seen how he can level up in the playoffs. The real question is how his support group will coalesce around him, particularly with Jake Walman and Connor Murphy notably struggling to stay afloat of late.

The Ducks’ defensive group is led by Jackson LaCombe, who has been dominant in his own right in his third full NHL season. Some fans might’ve bristled when the Ducks decided to commit $9 million a year to LaCombe through 2034, but he’s a legit No. 1 with clear two-way upside. The Ducks haven’t found a long-term partner for LaCombe just yet, but Jacob Trouba has done a passable job in the interim. Meanwhile, John Carlson has been a near-perfect fit since coming over from the Washington Capitals at the deadline, posting 14 points in 16 games. During his 5-on-5 shifts, the Ducks have trounced their opponents 71-44 in high-danger chances.

Nevertheless, while the Ducks have strong individual pieces on the blue line, their overall results … weren’t great. They allowed the fourth-most goals in the entire league, behind only such defensive powerhouses as the Vancouver Canucks, Toronto Maple Leafs, and San Jose Sharks. That lined up perfectly with the underlying results, which indicated that the Ducks conceded the fourth-most high-danger chances against in the league. For all the success LaCombe and Carlson had in all three zones, guys like Pavel Mintyukov, Drew Helleson, and Trouba faltered at times. Of course, the Ducks are far from the first aspiring young contender to learn how to score before figuring out how to defend, but it’s still a bit of a weakness for the high-powered Oilers to exploit.

Goaltending

In Lukas Dostal, the Ducks have one of the most talented young goaltenders in the sport. The Czech netminder has emerged as Anaheim’s full-fledged starter over the last three seasons and has put in yeoman’s work behind an often undermanned Ducks blue line. This year, Dostal’s numbers have left a little to be desired (30-20-4, .888 SV%), but he’s also been playing for a Ducks team that finished bottom-five in expected goals against at 5-on-5. We’ve seen plenty of incredible big-game performances from Dostal in the past, most recently at the Winter Olympics against Canada, but this will be the 25-year-old’s first playoff experience.

Edmonton’s goaltending has been an adventure all year. With fans screaming for the team to replace Stuart Skinner after a rough first two months, the Oilers obliged in December and traded for Tristan Jarry from the Pittsburgh Penguins. But while Skinner has largely been okay in Pittsburgh, Jarry has fallen apart completely in Edmonton, posting a brutal .858 save percentage in 19 games while largely ceding control of the crease to Connor Ingram, who projects to be the Oilers’ Game 1 starter. Ingram has had his share of ups and downs in the NHL, but he acquitted himself nicely in the playoffs (albeit in a small sample) with the Nashville Predators four years ago. Nevertheless, Dostal gives the Ducks a decent edge between the pipes.

Injuries

The biggest shadow looming over this series undoubtedly belongs to Draisaitl, who hasn’t played since mid-March while recovering from a lower-body injury. The 30-year-old forward has scored 34 goals in 59 games over the Oilers’ last three playoff runs and has been as instrumental to this team’s playoff success as anybody, taking over games and coming up with clutch moments on the regular.

Draisaitl is expected to return against the Ducks, although nobody is quite sure exactly when. Trade deadline acquisition Jason Dickinson is also questionable for the start of the series. Otherwise, the Oilers look ready to go.

The only major question mark for the Ducks is team captain Radko Gudas, who missed seven of their last eight games while dealing with a combination of injury issues and Auston Matthews drama. Gudas will probably return in time to face the Oilers, although in a somewhat diminished role now that Carlson is eating up a ton of minutes on the right side.

Intangibles

There’s a fair bit of Oilers-Ducks crossover on one side of this series. In Edmonton, Adam Henrique and Max Jones will both be going up against a Ducks team that cast them aside in recent seasons. The Oilers will need a lot more from Henrique in these playoffs after the veteran center mustered up just three goals in 65 games this year. Henrique is the only player in this series who has played in a playoff game with the Ducks, appearing in all four when San Jose swept Anaheim back in 2018.

The Ducks, meanwhile, have just one Alberta product on their roster: Olen Zellweger, a Calgary kid who would certainly love to help Anaheim vanquish these Oilers. The 22-year-old lefty may not dress for Game 1, particularly given his smaller stature (5-foot-10, 193 pounds) and Mintyukov’s emergence as the Ducks’ No. 2 LHD. But if he does draw in, don’t be surprised if he ends up with the puck on his stick quite a lot.

X-Factor

For the Oilers, it’s Draisaitl, but if he can’t play, it’s Bouchard. Everybody knows what McDavid can do, and we’ve seen it consistently now (especially in the playoffs) for the better part of a decade. Bouchard has also done incredible things in the postseason — he’s genuinely one of the most productive playoff defensemen ever — but if he can get through this series largely gaffe-free, it’ll set the table perfectly for Draisaitl to return in the following rounds.

Meanwhile, Anaheim’s X-factor is Troy Terry. The 28-year-old winger will get his first chance to play playoff hockey this spring, and while he managed 57 points in 61 games with the Ducks this year, the figure most fans have come to associate with Terry is his two hits this season — both of which came in the same game against the Canucks this past week. The playoffs are a grind, and it’s fair to question whether Terry has enough edge in his game to get through that, particularly after he missed 21 games due to injury this season.

Series Prediction

It’s great to see the Ducks back in the playoffs after many years in the wilderness, and they should become a true contender in the Western Conference with time. They’ve got some great young pieces. These Oilers aren’t quite the Goliath they’ve been in the past three postseasons, but it’s tough to bet against Connor McDavid against a California team. The Oilers’ goaltending is questionable enough that this won’t be a sweep. But once again, don’t be surprised if this first round mainly serves as an opportunity for McDavid and Co. to get back up to speed ahead of a deep run.

Oilers in six games.

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POST SPONSORED BY bet365

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