Much has been made of the former Toronto Maple Leaf flipping the script and becoming a post-season stud for his new club. The Vegas Golden Knights winger came into Thursday night’s Game 6 meeting with the Anaheim Ducks leading the post-season in scoring, and sitting tied with Team Canada teammate Nathan MacKinnon for the scoring lead in Round 2, too.
One minute into Game 6, Marner made clear he has no intention of slowing down, the smooth-skating winger breaking in all alone on Ducks netminder Lukas Dostal, and pulling a filthy move to draw first blood for the Golden Knights.
Seven minutes later, he was on the board again, setting up Brett Howden for a short-handed tally that wound up as the night’s game-winning goal, and series-clinching goal.
The Ducks weren’t able to close the gap, falling 5-1 in the end, bringing their meteoric campaign of progress to a close. For Vegas, the second-round win sends them back to the conference final for the first time since their Cup-winning run in 2023. The organization has reached the conference final five times since joining the league in 2017-18, the most of any club in that span.
Marner was no doubt essential in getting them there. It was an up-and-down regular season for the winger in his first campaign as a Knight — he posted 80 points in Vegas after a career-best 102-point season to close out his tenure in Toronto. But this Golden Knights run has seen Marner play the best hockey of his playoff career. His seven goals rank as the second-most tallied by a Golden Knights player in their first post-season with the franchise, one behind Jonathan Marchessault’s eight in 2018, and Marner became the second Golden Knight to record multi-point games in two straight series-clinching tilts after posting two goals and an assist in Vegas’s series-ender against Utah.
The Markham, Ont., product finishes Round 2 with a league-leading 18 points through 12 games in these playoffs — a career-best mark in the post-season. More importantly for him and his Golden Knights, he now heads into territory his former club could never reach: the third round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“He’s a game-breaker,” teammate Jack Eichel said on the broadcast after the final buzzer sounded on Vegas’s series-clinching win. “You saw it in that series — he was the best player in that series. I mean, he comes out here in the beginning of the first period, makes two incredible plays, and all of a sudden you’re playing with a lead.
“He’s on a pretty special run right now. It’s been a lot of fun to watch. I’m so happy for him — I feel like he’s had a lot of critics, and I feel like he’s shutting a lot of people up right now.”
Golden Knights’ special-teams dominance continues in series-clincher
The Golden Knights came into Game 6 vastly outperforming their young opponent on the special-teams front.
Through five games in this series, Vegas’s power play was humming at 30.8 per cent, the second-best mark of all Round 2 participants, while Anaheim’s man-advantage unit struggled to a 17.6-per cent success rate. The same went for the penalty kill — Vegas came into Game 6 with their kill operating at 83.4 per cent, again among the best in Round 2, compared to Anaheim’s 69.2 per cent.
In Game 6, that trend continued. A dominant first period saw Vegas build a 3-0 lead on the back of some sterling special-teams play. After Marner’s opening-minute display, the Knights collected a short-handed goal and a power-play tally to put the Ducks on their heels early.
Anaheim managed one power-play marker in the second period — a Mikael Granlund snipe that wound up as the Ducks’ only goal of the night — but overall left plenty of opportunities to get back in the game on the table. The Ducks finished the night 1-for-5 on the power play, and 4-for-22 in the series overall — a stark drop-off from their league-leading 8-for-16 success rate in Round 1.
Dorofeyev, Howden stay hot, take over top of playoffs goal-scoring race
Pavel Dorofeyev’s banner year continued Thursday night. The 25-year-old put up a career-best 37 goals during the regular season, besting the career-best 35 he potted a year prior. And through two rounds of this post-season, the Russian winger has kept that elite pace alive.
He added two more goals in Game 6, scoring the final two tallies of Vegas’s 5-1 win, to take his 2026 post-season total to a league-leading nine goals in 12 games. Dorofeyev now has goals in three straight, putting up five tallies in Games 4, 5 and 6 to help close out the Ducks.
Earlier in the night, it was teammate Howden who briefly took over that top spot in the playoff goal-scoring race when he tallied his eighth goal of the post-season. The 28-year-old had just 12 goals during the regular season, and has already set a career high in the playoff goals category, sitting just a handful away from equalling that regular-season sum.
Howden’s short-handed tally Thursday night was his third of this Golden Knights’ run, leaving him tied for the most in a single post-season.
Sennecke, Ducks’ young stars held off the board in pivotal Game 6
Anaheim’s 20-year-old phenom, Beckett Sennecke, came into Thursday night’s tilt on fire — the winger had goals in four straight games heading into Game 6, including tallies in both of Anaheim’s wins in this series.
Thursday night, the run came to an end as the veteran Knights held Sennecke and the rest of Anaheim’s young stars — 22-year-old Cutter Gauthier, 21-year-old Leo Carlsson, and 25-year-old Jackson LaCombe — off the board. Sennecke, who finishes tied for the team lead in goals during this playoff run, got his chances, throwing a team-leading five shots on net, but was unable to break through.
Still, though their 2026 run comes to an end, the Ducks no doubt sent a message this season in what was an immense step forward for the organization. After missing the playoffs for much of the past decade, the club’s young core turned their potential into performance in these playoffs, and put the rest of the West on notice.
Next up: Vegas meets Colorado in the Western Conference Final
Now, the path gets far more difficult for the Golden Knights.
After taking down two younger, more inexperienced squads in Utah and Anaheim through the first two rounds, Vegas now gets the opposite challenge in Round 3: an incredibly experienced Colorado Avalanche team that’s looked far and away the best in the league all season.
Colorado enters Round 3 having swept the Los Angeles Kings in Round 1, followed up by taking down another bona fide contender, the Minnesota Wild, in Round 2. In the regular season, the Avs took two of three meetings with Vegas, winning once in regulation and once in a shootout, while the Knights claimed one win themselves in overtime.
In what will be a series of seasoned vets, the Golden Knights and Avs will head into their third-round battle with 23 Cup winners dotted among both squads (12 for Vegas, 11 for Colorado), marking the first time in more than a decade that a conference final match-up will feature two clubs with double-digit Cup winners on their rosters.