EDMONTON, Alberta (AP) - Connor McDavid isn’t the only youngster on the Edmonton Oilers making an impact right now.
Leon Draisaitl scored his 10th goal of the season 3:16 into overtime and Edmonton came away with a 3-2 victory over the visiting Anaheim Ducks on Saturday night.
The 21-year-old has seven goals and 13 points in his last 10 games.
“There is a lot of talk about what Connor does, and that is pretty evident, but I think we are seeing another young guy really emerge as a go-to guy in Leon,” Oilers coach Todd McLellan said. “I told him on the bench to be the best player on the ice, you don’t have to be the second-best. He responded with the winning goal. I was happy for him.”
Drake Caggiula and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins also scored for the Oilers, who have won two in a row.
“It’s obviously a big win for us,” said Draisaitl, who is from Germany. “The race is really tight in our conference right now. All the teams up there have the same amount of points, it feels like. Beating a team that we are up against, it’s huge.”
Jordan Eberle assisted on all three Oilers goals.
Ryan Kesler and Rickard Rakell replied for the Ducks, who had a three-game winning streak come to an end.
“Any loss is tough. It was a good job fighting back, it was a bit of a let-down that we couldn’t get the second point,” said Ducks goalie John Gibson, who added that he has no explanation for his team’s difficulty in extra time, having lost five games that way this season.
“We want to take pride in every game we play and obviously we haven’t had the success we want in overtime. Still a lot of time left, so hopefully we can turn it around.”
It was pretty even through the scoreless first period, with Anaheim putting eight shots on Cam Talbot and the Oilers getting seven on Gibson.
The Oilers took the lead on the power play five minutes into the second period when Patrick Maroon fed a puck through to Caggiula, and he got Gibson going the wrong way to record his first NHL goal.
The Ducks responded midway through the middle frame with a power-play goal of their own, as Kesler swept in a puck from the doorstep for his ninth of the season.
Edmonton regained the lead with 6:25 to play in the second period when Nugent-Hopkins stepped in from the point and beat Gibson with a wrist shot from the top of the circle one second after a power play expired. It was his fourth of the year.
The Ducks tied it again midway through the third as a shot deflected out front to Rakell, who put his team-leading 10th goal of the season into a wide-open net.
Talbot had to be especially solid for the remainder of the third to push the game into extra time, when Draisaitl took a feed in front from Andrej Sekera and score to secure the win.
NOTES: Gibson turned away 29 shots, and Talbot stopped 31. … It was the second of five meetings between the two teams this season, with the Ducks winning the first game in Anaheim 4-1 in November. … Anaheim came into the game with an 8-1-1 record in its last 10 games against Edmonton. … Oilers defenseman Mark Fayne played just his second game of the season, coming in to replace injured Darnell Nurse, who is out longterm with a lower-body injury. … Former Oiler turned Duck Andrew Cogliano has never missed a game in his NHL career and played his 729th consecutive game.
UP NEXT
Ducks: Travel to Calgary for a game Sunday night.
Oilers: Host the Wild on Sunday night.
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