Anaheim Ducks: 4 Hard Truths The Ducks Face (And Why It’s Okay)
Number 1: This Core’s Window is Closed
Look, I’ve been cautiously optimistic for a long long time. I’ve thought “maybe just maybe” Bob Murray could pull a rabbit out of his hat, and pull this team together, from the depths of despair and bring them to the promised land once more. Give the Ducks who have given their entire career to this point, and the veterans chasing a Cup, one last hoorah before riding off into the sunset. But it’s time to face the music that this team is simply not going to get things done in its current state.
As it currently stands, the Ducks spend almost 1/3 of their cap space on 3 players, (Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, and Ryan Kesler) who are all 33 years old or older. It’s not uncommon for a team to have 20+ million tied up in your franchise players, it’s actually pretty common. But the age of those players is a major concern. When you look at the last 10 Stanley Cup Champions, and you look at the best player on those teams, the oldest one is Alex Ovechkin who is similarly aged to Getzlaf and Perry, but his second best player was a 26-year-old, point per game player and his 3rd best player was a 30 year old perennial 70 point player who is on fire in recent playoff years.
“But Jon”, I hear you say “The Red Wings won 11 years ago, and they were very old!” You’re not wrong, they were an older team, and they did win a Cup. They were an incredibly well-built team from top to bottom, and they won a Cup, and went to the Cup finals after that! Since then however, the Red Wings have yet to make it past round 2, and are in Salary Cap purgatory with a roster that was hobbled together to compete as long as possible, not worrying about long term ramifications. The Ducks don’t have that luxury, they don’t have a legacy the length of the Red Wings, a prolonged rebuild could honestly be a nail in the coffin for a small market team like the Ducks, so while the Red Wings are an outlier, I don’t feel they are comparable to the Ducks regardless.
Why It’s Okay
Well, I won’t lie to you, it’s not ever fun to say “Well, we’re not winning a Cup” but big picture this is not a bad thing for the Ducks. As it stands, the reason that the Ducks have built so heavily around the aging core, is because they face the issue that every long in the tooth competitive team runs into, they’re not drafting in the first half of the first round of the draft. It’s incredibly difficult to get game-breaking elite talent when you’re drafting in the 20’s every draft. Yes, you can get players like John Gibson, Rickard Rakell, and Brandon Montour. Get an inexplicable dropper like Cam Fowler, but while all of them are great in their own way, none (outside of Gibson) are what I would consider elite talents. And it can’t be overstated that goaltenders are a different breed, it’s so difficult to predict how they will turn out, you might as well flip a coin.
If there’s one thing you cannot take away from Bob Murray, it’s that he’s a phenomenal drafter. He rarely misses on his picks in the first round, and that’s even more impressive when you factor in the late position in the first round he’s picking. As it stands currently, Bob Murray has only selected inside the top 10 twice in his tenure (Only one being his own pick). The first was Hampus Lindholm who has been a revelation, and it’s not as though Lindholm was the consensus pick. The great Bob McKenzie had Lindholm as the 7th best defenseman on the board, behind Ryan Murray, Griffin Reinhart, Matt Dumba, Morgan Rielly, Jacob Trouba, Olli Maatta, and Cody Ceci.
Murray went a bit off the board and took Lindholm over 3 of those players, and it’s not hard to argue that Lindholm is the best of those 7 altogether (2nd best at worst). The other wasn’t quite as big of a home run with Nick Ritchie, but it’s important to note that the 2014 draft was quite top-heavy, and had more “boom or bust” picks than most other drafts. At 10 when Ritchie was selected, there was 4 other players selected in the next 20 picks who have been better in my opinion. So no he didn’t knock it out of the park, but he hit a nice double by taking someone who was a higher floor, but lower ceiling.
The point being that if Murray concedes that this season is not meant to be a winner, and tries to build a bit for the future, his track record (And this upcoming draft which has a pretty talented top half with a few that could really change a teams fortunes long term) indicates the Ducks could enter next season with a blue-chip prospect to replace that aging core, and could help pry that window open sooner than later.