Edmonton, Alberta – The Edmonton Oilers must have hoped it would be Retro Night at Rexall Place on Thursday night. There were plenty of No. 99 Wayne Gretzky jerseys, at least, and a sizable number of mullets in the crowd in honor of veteran Oilers forward Ryan Smyth.
On the ice, however, the Oilers’ retro style of play didn’t go over so well, especially with referees Paul Devorski and Dan O’Halloran. The little hooks, holds and tugs against the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim – which would have probably been fine under the old NHL rules – did not go unnoticed by the referees.
As a result, the heavily penalized Oilers dug themselves a major hole early in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, couldn’t overcome it and now are going to Disneyland for Game 5. The Mighty Ducks staved off elimination with a 6-3 victory over the Oilers, a game that saw six 5-on-3 power plays.
The Ducks are one quarter of the way to becoming the first NHL team since the 1975 New York Islanders to win a series after trailing 3-0.
“This team has been resilient all year,” said Ducks center Todd Marchant, who had three assists. “We could have easily just packed it in. But this team said: ‘You know what? We’re going to go out and give it everything we have. We’ll just throw everything at them and see what happens.”‘
There wasn’t much the Mighty Ducks failed to throw at Oilers goalie Dwayne Roloson in the first period. He allowed five goals overall and has given up nine in his past four periods. The Mighty Ducks hit Edmonton with a staggering first-period blow, outshooting the Oilers 25-3 for a 3-0 lead. The third goal, by Ryan Getzlaf, came on one of Anaheim’s four 5-on-3s in the game.
“That’s a lot,” Getzlaf said. “That’s the way it’s been. That happened to us last game, where we had two 5-on-3s against us. That’s the way the refs have been calling it all year.”
When fan favorite Georges Laraque scored at 10:01 of the second period to cut the Anaheim lead to 4-3, Laraque did the hockey version of the Lambeau Leap into the corner glass.
The Oilers upped the pressure even more after Laraque’s goal, all to the deafening roar of the crowd. The Mighty Ducks managed to hold onto the lead, however, then re-established some control late in the period when Joffrey Lupul – he of the four-goal effort against the Avalanche in Game 3 of the second round – grabbed a loose puck in the right faceoff circle and rifled a shot over Roloson’s shoulder to make it 5-3 with 1:38 left.
“That goal hurt us,” Oilers coach Craig MacTavish said. “We weren’t as puck-conscious as we should have been. Lupul picked it out of the traffic and put it upstairs. You’ve got to give them a lot of credit. They got a good break on the first (goal, by Dustin Penner). They haven’t gotten many breaks to this point in the series. They got the 5-on-3s, we started to take penalties and there were some questionable calls, I thought, but we deserved a lot of them.”
Anaheim got the win despite converting only one of its eight power-play chances, and are 2-for-28 in the series. But they have scored eight goals at even strength in the past two games on Roloson, who faced 46 shots and might be getting a little tired – mentally and physically – from so much pressure during Edmonton’s playoff run.
After Game 3, Mighty Ducks star Teemu Selanne said the “ketchup was coming out of the bottle” when it came to Anaheim goal-scoring.
Marchant used a variation on the word to describe why Game 4 turned out differently than the first three.
“The first three games, we had to play catch-up against them, and you saw the difference in a team when it had to tonight,” Marchant said. “No pun intended.”
Adrian Dater can be reached at 303-820-5454 or adater@denverpost.com.
