The Ducks were the grizzled veteran club led by the likes of Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, and Ryan Kesler. They were a team that were constantly dominant in the regular season but were starved for playoff success.

The Oilers had finally ended the Decade of Darkness, and a young Connor McDavid was taking the league by storm. Leon Draisaitl blossomed into a superstar during the series, and even though the series didn’t go the Oilers’ way, Edmonton was viewed as the team of the future in the Western Conference.

Fast forward to 2026, and it’s the Oilers who are the veteran team, fighting for another shot at a Stanley Cup while the Ducks, led by the likes of Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier, are the flashy youngsters who are arriving in the playoffs for the first time in their careers.

Experience can be a funny thing.

In that series back in 2017, the Oilers jumped out to a 2-0 lead, winning both games on the road in Anaheim, but then lost the next three games before eventually falling in Game 7.

They were able to get out of the gates quickly, but over the course of seven games, the veteran Ducks were simply too much. They had some big comebacks, and they got some breaks. I don’t need to remind you about Kesler holding Cam Talbot’s pad, but they also played really well.

The Oilers are a team that is built to wear down their opposition.

People watch the Oilers and see the likes of McDavid, Draisaitl, and Bouchard and think that the Oilers are a run-and-gun team that loves to trade chances and play in high-scoring hockey games. But that’s really not who they are.

Last year against the Kings, they dominated possession at five-on-five with a 57 per cent shot share and a 60 per cent expected goal share.

Against Vegas, those numbers were 55 per cent and 57 per cent. Against the Stars and Panthers, they were weaker, but the read I get from that is when the Oilers are the better team on paper, they find a way to dominate the game.

That’s the read I have coming into this series against Anaheim.

Sure, at points over the last few postseasons they’ve been forced to play in some high-scoring games due to goaltending struggles, but plenty of their signature wins over the last few runs have been low-scoring games where they dominate the possession battle and control the flow of the game by cycling the other team to death in the offensive zone.

This year, you could argue that the presence of Connor Ingram makes it even easier for the Oilers to play that style of game.

This team should have a ton of confidence that if they keep the other team to the outside in their own end, don’t give up too many chances off the rush, and focus on taking care of the puck in the neutral zone, their goalie will also do his job and stop the shots that he’s supposed to.

They have a goalie who doesn’t have a tendency to give up a soft goal at inopportune times, and I think that could lead to the Oilers playing a very confident brand of hockey, knowing that they don’t need to take a bunch of risks in the name of offence because on most nights, three goals should be enough to win.

The Ducks have an offence that has a very high ceiling. They scored five or more goals 16 different times this season and had five different games where they scored seven goals.

The Oilers had three games where they scored seven or more and 22 games where they scored five or more. Anaheim’s offence is very good, but it’s not like the Oilers have struggled to score this season, and we know that the margins get thinner in the playoffs.

Playoff games are tighter checking, and it’s not as easy to create offence. The Oilers’ challenge will be to not give the Ducks any easy ones: the 2-on-1s that are a result of bad pinches, the breakaways that are a result of sloppy play in the neutral zone, you know the drill.

Those will kill the Oilers, but the good news is that over the last few weeks, we haven’t seen those kinds of mistakes. They have a blue line that can move the puck and also keep up with the Ducks’ young stars, and they have a deep forward group that can take over games, and this year they have a goalie that should give them a chance to win every single night.

This team knows the blueprint to winning games in April and May, and while that sounds cliché, I think that experience will be a major factor in deciding this series. Just like it was nine years ago.

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