Ducks' storybook season comes to an end with Game 6 loss to Golden Knights

The carriage has turned back into a pumpkin, the ballgown is once again just tattered clothing and all the horses have gone back to being mice.

The Ducks' Cinderella run through the NHL playoffs came to an abrupt end Thursday in a 5-1 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 6 of the teams' second-round Stanley Cup playoff series. But that's likely not the end of the story because, just like in the children's parable, this Cinderella intends to wear the glass slipper one day.

And this spring's playoff run may have moved the team a big step closer to making that fairy tale a reality.

"We proved that we're really good team," said Troy Terry, the last link to 2018 and the last Ducks team to reach the postseason. "And then you get into playoffs, and you get kind of a taste of it and just what it takes at that level. We learned, myself included, just how to play in those games.

"I know that it stings right now. But [it] created a spark."

This team wasn't supposed to be at the ball this long. Fourteen players on its roster had never been to the postseason before; most of them had never even played for a winning team in the NHL before. But the Ducks' youth and inexperience proved to be a strength, not a weakness.

They didn't know they weren't supposed to win in the playoffs, so they did, dispatching the Edmonton Oilers - who made the last two Stanley Cup finals - in the first round and outplaying the veteran Golden Knights, a playoff team in eight of the franchise's nine seasons, throughout much of the second round.

So while the season ended in a loss, that only made the spark glow brighter.

"That brings us to an expectation next year, that we've got to come back and do the same thing and go further," rookie Beckett Sennecke said. "We've got a super young core here. We're a fast team and we play with a lot of skill, a lot of pace. The next few years are exciting."

"Expectations are going to be higher," added Ducks' coach Joel Quenneville. "They should be higher, individually and collectively. That's how you get better."

Consider that young core, a dozen of whom are aged 25 or younger. Sennecke, just 20, had four goals and an assist in the six games with Vegas. Winger Cutter Gauthier, just 22, led the team with 12 points in his first trip to the playoffs. Defenseman Olen Zellweger, also 22, had a goal and assist in his first two playoff games and Olympic gold medalist Jackson LaCombe, 25, led the team in ice time - and was fourth in points with 10 - in his first postseason.

That's the core Sennecke was talking about, the one that will lead the team going forward. And the playoff experience they got this spring will be invaluable.

"We've got a lot of young skill. We've got some young guys that have some upside and could be not just good players, hopefully they can get to another level," Quenneville said. "At the end of the year we're probably disappointed with a couple things, but at the same time, these things are repairable. Not even repairable, because I don't even think nothing's broken.

"We've had a lot of character pieces here, and that's where the growth starts. This was an experience where you can say this should help us moving forward."

The end came early for the Ducks, who fell behind 62 seconds into a game they couldn't afford to lose on a spectacular breakaway goal from Vegas' Mitch Marner. Brett Howden doubled the lead with a shorthanded goal 7 ½ minutes later and when Shea Theodore scored on a power play 2:41 before the first intermission, the Ducks' summer had basically begun.

Still, Anaheim didn't quit, with Mikael Granlund cutting into the deficit with a power-play goal midway through a second period the Ducks dominated. But then a pair of third-period goals from Vegas' Pavel Dorofeyev, both off Ducks' mistakes, extinguished any hope of a comeback by a team that rallied so many times in the regular season.

But if the Ducks lost the game, they may have won something bigger. Just three years ago they lost a franchise-worst 50 games and the year before that they garnered just 58 points, the low for a full season. This year they won 43 games, led the Pacific Division for most of the season and made it to the second round of the playoffs.

The Ducks hadn't played in the postseason in eight years and hadn't won a postseason series in nine seasons. This year they did both. So when the final horn sounded, the standing-room-only crowd of 16,778 at the Honda Center - a crowd that had booed the Ducks off the ice at the end of the first period - stood and applauded.

The present may be dark and dreary, but the future is bright.

"We entered the playoffs maybe just trying to prove to ourselves that we can do it. Then that quickly turned into bigger aspirations," Terry said. "That's why it's a little harder to swallow right now because I thought there were chances that series maybe could have gone different way. It gave us just a taste of A, just how hard it is to get back to the playoffs and B, how rewarding it is to go through this journey.

"I hope that everyone goes home hungry and wants to be back here and keep building on this."

Because at some point the glass slipper is going to fit.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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This story was originally published May 14, 2026 at 10:26 PM.