The lack of experience may have caught up to the Ducks against the playoff-savvy Golden Knights, who have 12 Stanley Cup champions on their roster and seven players with at least 100 games of playoff experience.<\/p>\n
Anaheim did hang in there, though, and had the puck bounced its way in a 3-2 overtime loss in Game 5 on Tuesday, things might have been different.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do really think we had a chance to beat that team, and we were playing a really good team,\u201d Ducks forward Mikael Granlund<\/a>\u00a0said. \u201cIt was a really tight series, and we all know next season we want to get better and we want to get further. But at the same time, it\u2019s really tough to think about that right now. It\u2019s disappointing.\u201d<\/p>\n In part because it was the little things that ended up making a big difference in the series.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m proud of the group,\u201d Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said. \u201cThis was a good experience. Our younger guys got better and better and our older guys helped them out. We had a strong locker room, and I thought we were competitive in a lot of ways.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously, Vegas got better every single game. They played well, they checked well and they deserved to win.\u201d<\/p>\n The Golden Knights are still in their championship window, which essentially opened in 2017-18, when they joined the League as an expansion team and advanced all the way to the Stanley Cup Final.<\/p>\n Anaheim is just prying its window open, one that has the potential to extend over the next decade because of a young, talented core, which includes forwards Beckett Sennecke<\/a>, 20; Leo Carlsson<\/a>, 21; Cutter Gauthier<\/a>, 22; and Mason McTavish<\/a>, 23; defensemen Jackson LaCombe<\/a>, 25; Pavel Mintyukov<\/a>, 22; and Olen Zellweger<\/a>, 22; and goalie Lukas Dostal<\/a>, 25.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sure this team is going to be very good for a long time, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d Granlund said. \u201cBut now we have to wait for the next season, and we wanted to do something in this season. At the same time, there\u2019s a lot of good teams in this League as we\u2019ve seen, and it\u2019s not easy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The lack of experience may have caught up to the Ducks against the playoff-savvy Golden Knights, who have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-671063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}