ANAHEIM — Aggressive offense and stellar goaltending dovetailed to earn the Ducks a 4-1 victory over the New Jersey Devils at Honda Center on Sunday night.
It was the Ducks’ third straight win, leaving them one shy of their longest streak from all of last season. Two goals off counterattacks and a nearly clean sheet for Lukáš Dostál propelled the effort.
The “kid line,” centered by 22-year-old Mason McTavish, looked all grown up. It generated 16 scoring chances to just two against, per Natural Stat Trick.
“I think we moved our feet tonight. We created a lot of odd-man rushes. We were kind of rolling around their o-zone, and we had a couple long o-zone shifts,” Beckett Sennecke said. “We set the next lines up well. I think we just had a great team effort.”
McTavish’s flankers, Sennecke and Cutter Gauthier, engineered goals for each other. Frank Vatrano broke the seal with his first goal of the season and Chris Kreider tacked on an empty-netter. Dostál repelled 32 pucks.
Jack Hughes netted New Jersey’s lone goal. Jake Allen made 25 saves.
Off the hop, the Ducks struck at 4:15 and 14:24. Their opening salvo also included a shorthanded breakaway for Troy Terry on which he hit the net twice and, later, the puck narrowly eluded Leo Carlsson at the side of an open cage.
The future was now as Sennecke, 19, and Gauthier, 21, executed a give-and-go play across three zones. Sennecke’s saucer pass found Gauthier, whose return pass led Sennecke across the blue line and toward the net, where he roofed a wrist shot. The transition tally was the rookie’s fourth goal and yet another indicator that he’ll be sticking around all year.
“They’re a fast team. They’re young, they’re skilled and they take advantage of line rushes when you make mistakes with the puck,” New Jersey forward Jesper Bratt said.
Then it was Vatrano recording his first goal of the campaign – he scored 80 of them in the past three seasons since arriving in Orange County – albeit with Jackson LaCombe deserving much of the credit. As the Devils attempted to break out, LaCombe pinched and accosted Devils captain Nico Hischier to force a turnover. LaCombe then dove to the ice to steer the puck to Vatrano for a no-doubt redirection.
Vatrano said the goal “felt great,” but also credited his cohorts roving the blue line.
“Unbelievable, even that whole shift, the way (LaCombe) was patrolling the offensive zone,” Vatrano said. “He and (Drew Helleson) made some great movement up top and I was just trying to find an area to get open.”
The Ducks would extend their lead 1:54 into the second period, when Gauthier scored from an impossibly sharp angle off a shot parallel to the goal line. Gauthier leads the team with seven goals.
With 13:26 left in the stanza, Dostál made two saves in rapid succession against a New Jersey rush. His acrobatics gave the offense breathing room and it rewarded him with support, hauling a 3-0 advantage into the third intermission.
“He was unreal tonight,” Sennecke said. “He made a couple crucial saves and after that we just took over.”
What would have been Dostál’s first shutout of 2025-26 was broken up by a turnabout that saw the Ducks nearly score at the end of a power play before they were victimized by one of the league’s elite scorers.
McTavish zipped a seam pass to Sennecke on the doorstep just as Dawson Mercer’s penalty was expiring. Sennecke’s point-blank bid bounced off Allen before Timo Meier lobbed the puck to Mercer, fresh out of the sin bin, who hit Hughes for a one-timer. His 10th goal of the season moved him into a three-way tie for the league lead.
“It looked like we had the game in the bag, and the next thing you know, it was a 3-1 hockey game, and they can make plays,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said.
New Jersey applied heavy pressure with Allen pulled for an extra attacker, but Dostál and the Ducks weathered that storm until Kreider skated down a clearing effort to nudge the puck into the empty net with 1:54 to play, cementing the result.
That was Kreider’s sixth goal in seven games as a Duck since being acquired from the New York Rangers over the summer. Carlsson’s assist extended his points streak to six games while Troy Terry saw a surge of commensurate length come to a close.
Next up, the Ducks will host one of Quenneville’s former teams, the defending champion Florida Panthers, on Tuesday.