Joel Quenneville had one mission when he took over as coach of the Ducks last year: get them back to the playoffs.
He did much better than that. The Ducks scored a franchise-record 273 goals, spent much of the season atop the Pacific Division and knocked off the powerful Edmonton Oilers in the first round of the playoffs before falling to the Vegas Golden Knights, the eventual conference champions, in the second round.
All of which raises a question for Quenneville and the Ducks coming off a summer of upheaval and turnover: What can they do for an encore?
“Expectations are going to be higher across the board,” said Quenneville, whose team opens the season Friday in Las Vegas against the Golden Knights. “That’s healthy. But at the same time, it’s an everyday thing that that challenge is going to be out there.”
Before Quenneville arrived, the Ducks stumbled through a franchise-record seven straight losing seasons. Now many of the players in his locker room are thinking beyond just making the postseason.
“The culture change, we can really feel it,” goaltender Lukas Dostal said. “What we did last year, obviously we want to improve and move even further.
“You don’t play hockey to just think like ‘OK, we want to make the playoffs.’ You want to go as far as possible. So the sky’s the limit. I really trust this team.”
“At the end of the day, you want to win a Stanley Cup,” added new captain Mikael Granlund. “You have to have that one goal. We’re going to do everything we can to be better than last year.”
Many Ducks are certainly going to be better paid than last year. General manager Pat Verbeek had no choice but to overspend on center Leo Carlsson, signing him to a five-year, $90-million contract after the Flyers offered Carlsson the same deal. The 21-year-old, who had a career-high 29 goals and 38 assists last season, is the NHL’s highest-paid player this season.
Verbeek also re-signed restricted free agents Cutter Gauthier, (six years, $81 million) and Pavel Mintyukov (five years, $36 million) and gave center Tim Washe a $9-million contract extension. Gauthier led the team with 41 goals and 69 points last season.
“It’s a sign you’re doing something correctly,” Quenneville said of his players being rewarded. “But at the same time, I don’t think we change too much our demands. They know we work on a meritocracy and the better you do, the more you’re going to play.”
Ducks defenseman Pavel Mintyukov passes against the Utah Mammoth on March 20.
(Melissa Majchrzak / Associated Press)
All that spending left the team with nothing to offer veteran winger Chris Kreider, who was released this summer, joining an exodus that included key defensemen John Carlson, Radko Gudas, Olen Zellweger and Jacob Trouba.
The Ducks will also be without forward Troy Terry, who averaged 24 goals over the past five seasons, until well into the winter as he recovers from hip surgery.
As a result, the Ducks start with several new pieces up front and thin experience on the blue line, which isn’t a good look for a team that gave up 288 goals last season, fourth-most in the NHL.
Despite the additions of veterans A.J. Greer, a Stanley Cup winner in Florida who was acquired to add a physical presence in the attack, and Nick Jensen, 36, who was signed to stabilize the defense, the Ducks will once again have one of the youngest rosters in the NHL. But Quenneville has a history of turning young teams into champions. Nineteen years ago he took over a Chicago Blackhawks team that was the youngest in the league and led it to the conference final. A year later that team captured the Stanley Cup, the first of three Quenneville won in Chicago.
For the Ducks to match that, their summer additions will have to add up to more than the subtractions. And the investment Verbeek made in Carlsson, Gauthier and Mintyukov will have to pay off. What’s certain, however, is after last season’s breakthrough, the Ducks won’t be sneaking up on anyone.
“We made it a little harder for ourselves,” Washe said. “We’ve got a little target on our back.”
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com
