Olen Zellweger buried a shot from the circle late in the third period, and Anaheim rode that equalizer to a 4-3 win over Vegas in Game 4. The Ducks answered a 6-2 loss in Game 3 with a comeback that kept them alive in the series and forced Vegas to spend the final minutes chasing the puck instead of protecting a lead.
Beckett Sennecke started the surge by converting on a five-minute power play to make it 1-0, then Anaheim kept finding ways to respond every time the game swung back the other way. Mikael Granlund got a fortunate bounce to make it 2-1, Alex Killorn scored from in deep to give Anaheim a 3-2 lead, and Ian Moore pushed it to 4-2 by scoring through traffic before Vegas pulled back within one. Zellweger’s goal came after Lukas Dostal delivered a huge kick save to keep the Ducks within a goal, a stop that mattered because it preserved the chance for the late comeback that followed.
The result came during a media day that also included Joel Quenneville, Dostal, Terry, Scott Niedermayer and Pat Verbeek, but the story on the ice was simpler than the names around it. Anaheim entered Game 4 needing to show that Game 3 was a bad night, not a warning sign, and the Ducks did that by winning the special-teams battle early, surviving the middle stretches when Vegas kept pressing, and then answering again when the game looked ready to slip away.
The one detail that separated this from a routine rebound was the timing of Zellweger’s finish. Late in the third, with the pressure at its highest and the margin at its thinnest, he found the circle, released the shot and tied the game when Anaheim needed it most. From there, the Ducks closed out a 4-3 victory that changed the mood around the series and left Vegas dealing with the consequence of letting a one-sided Game 3 turn into a far different Game 4.
