When Bob Murray hired Randy Carlyle last spring, he said he feared the Ducks’ competitive window was closing.
The general manager was right about the hire. He might have been wrong about the window. It may even be widening, which doesn’t mean more Ducks fans should jump through it today.
The Ducks lost a six-game Western Conference demolition derby to Nashville. There were no excuse-mes. People were hit with bad intentions. The bayonets came out on every faceoff. Some NHL vets thought it was the angriest series in decades. The Predators will have six days to heal up for the Stanley Cup Final and will need every minute.
Since Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry turned 32 during the playoffs and Ryan Kesler turns 33 in August, there might have been a tinge of finality.
Instead, a new layer of talent, and eventual leadership, seemed to come forth. There were Rickard Rakell, Cam Fowler, Jakob Silfverberg, Hampus Lindholm, Nick Ritchie, Brandon Montour, Josh Manson, Andrej Kase and Chris Wagner playing big minutes, conjuring up big goals, taking and dealing big hits.
Perry had 19 regular-season goals, lowest in a full season since 2007, but his playoff mischief was nostalgically real. The point is that the Ducks won the division with Perry playing hit-or-miss hockey and were seeded second in the West, and five times during the playoffs they came back from at least two goals down.
Murray, scouting director Martin Madden and staff have made deals and tiptoed around the salary cap, but mainly they have drafted and developed.
You can’t win them all in the tight-cap world of the NHL. No team has taken back-to-back Stanley Cups since the 1997 and 1998 Red Wings. But you can play for them all, and Anaheim is one of six NHL teams to make five straight playoff appearances, and has the best point-percentage figure in that group.
They and Chicago are the only franchises with four consecutive 100-point seasons. They have been in four conference finals since the 2005-06 NHL makeover, more than anyone except Pittsburgh and Chicago.
And, yeah, these are the vials of aloe vera that one applies when one falls short of the only trophy that players dare touch.
But at least the Ducks had the good sense not to give “we had a great season” speech in the sour aftermath of Game 6, unlike every losing coach in the NCAA basketball tournament.
The Ducks have kept up appearances without high draft picks. Their highest was a second-overall in 2005, when new GM Brian Burke famously asked his scouts to tell him the dropoff point of the draft. “After No. 1,” he was told, referring to Sidney Crosby. So the Ducks took Bobby Ryan and later traded him for Silfverberg.
Their only other Top 10 picks in that span were Lindholm (sixth, 2012) and Ritchie (10th, 2014). Fowler should have been higher but slipped to 12th in 2010.
Rakell was 30th, in a 2011 draft that also brought Manson and goalie John Gibson. Montour, who made a cannonball splash into the playoffs, was a third-round pick.
In fact, every first-round pick the Ducks have made from 2008-14 is an established player somewhere in the NHL. They expect defenseman Jacob Larsson (2015), center Sam Steel (2016) and menacing winger Max Jones (2017) to join them. Steel piled up 131 points in 66 games for the Regina Pats in the Western League and was plus-49.
It wasn’t quite enough against Nashville, which suddenly represents the beautiful spontaneity of the hockey playoffs.
Where did the “win probability” savants put the Predators’ chances when they were eighth-seeded in the West? Yet they have clearly been the best team in the playoffs, with a 12-4 record and a first-round sweep of Chicago.
You win from the goalmouth out. Pekka Rinne was the best goalie in the series. P.K. Subban, Ryan Ellis, Roman Josi and particularly Mattias Ekholm were slightly more influential than the Ducks’ defensemen.
Carlyle wasn’t pleased the Ducks had only a 44-hour break between Edmonton and Nashville, and he thought his team was chasing the series throughout. He had a point, but the Ducks could have ousted Edmonton three days before that, and did not.
No sense prolonging the autopsy. At least 75 percent of the league envies the Ducks’ problems. St. Louis (1967), Vancouver (1970) and Washington (1974) came along a generation before the Ducks and still seek their first Cup.
The next trip to Adventureland starts in April 2018. Ducks fans can use a break first, to re-enter the banalities of the real world But they can see the Cup, elusive but attainable, outside the window.
