Two different Anaheim Ducks thoughts came to my attention almost simultaneously this week, one from the deep past, and one from the present, as the team tries to muddle its way back to respectability in the early stages of the 2024-25 NHL season.
The first item of interest came via the new Mike Keenan biography, entitled “Iron Mike, My Life Behind The Bench” — written with the help of Scott Morrison, the longtime hockey writer and sports editor for The Toronto Sun.
Keenan holds back little in his memoir. The dedication is just fantastic and sums up exactly the complicated and complex life and times of Iron Mike.
Keenan wrote: “To my loving family and many friends, thank you.
“And to those I pissed off or disappointed, I meant well.”
If that doesn’t grab you, the first sentence of Page 1 surely will.
“I really am a bastard,” Keenan wrote. “There, I said it. Over my six decades as a coach and general manager … players have referred to me in many different languages, using many different terms, most of them not terribly flattering. And, no doubt, I deserved most of them.”
And it just goes on from there.
When you compare the contents of Iron Mike to the banal pap that populates many hockey books, Keenan’s stories jolt you awake, right from the start. I covered Keenan from the beginning of his career, through the first years in Philadelphia when he made the Stanley Cup Final, to his final stop in Calgary, where he coached the Flames, when Darryl Sutter ran the team.
Keenan explores the controversial before, during and after times in New York, when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup for the only time in the last 84 years and did so with him behind the bench.
That’s provocative stuff. His difficult relationship with Neil Smith, who was the general manager of the team, was pretty well known, even at the time, but Keenan lays out, in detail, exactly what happened during the Rangers’ Stanley Cup run and then how it ended so abruptly.
I thought I knew about of a lot of things that happened to Keenan in his years in hockey, but I did get stopped by the admission that after he was fired in Chicago by the Blackhawks in 1993, he had a firm offer from Disney chairman Michael Eisner to become the first-ever coach and general manager of the expansion Ducks.
The salary offered, according to Keenan, was double what he was earning in Chicago ($400,000 per year, a lot of money in 1993), but he turned it down because he didn’t want to coach an expansion team. In those days, expansion terms were not as nearly generous as they were for the Vegas Golden Knights in 2017 and the Seattle Kraken in 2021.
Instead, it was a long, hard slog to respectability for the Ducks. They missed the playoffs in seven of their first nine years before unexpectedly making the final in 2003. Instead of Keenan, Jack Ferreira was the first GM in Anaheim and Ron Wilson was the Ducks’ first coach. Anaheim’s first-ever draft pick in 1993 was Paul Kariya.
But it would have been interesting to see what Keenan might have done differently there, had he taken the job. That 1993 draft featured a big trade between San Jose and Hartford, Hartford moving up from No. 6 to No. 2 to draft Chris Pronger.
Pronger, at 6-foot-6, was more of a Keenan-type player than Kariya, a small, but ultra-skilled winger — and of course, Keenan would have been in a better position to offer San Jose a sweetener to move up in the draft than what they got from Hartford.
Pronger eventually ended up in Anaheim and was a key figure in their 2007 Stanley Cup triumph. Before that, however, Keenan had traded for Pronger, soon after he became coach and general manager in St. Louis, right after the Rangers won the Stanley Cup.
What if Pronger had actually been in Anaheim right from the start? It’s a fascinating hypothetical because Kariya ultimately turned into the face of the Ducks’ franchise, but Progner eventually pushed them over the finish line in 2007.
Keenan said he considered the Ducks offer.
“That was an opportunity for sure,” he said. “I flew out to California and talked to them. But I had built a pretty good team in Chicago and said to myself, ‘I don’t think I have the patience for a five-year building process, after being to the Cup finals twice in Philly and once in Chicago.”
Instead, Keenan talked to both the Detroit Red Wings and Philadelphia Flyers before finally taking the job in New York. He said the decision to join the Rangers irreparably damaged his relationship with Flyers’ owner Ed Snider.
The offer from Snider was “a five-year deal, for good money, to go back to the Flyers and be in charge of player personnel and to coach. When I didn’t (take the job), Ed Snider never spoke to me again for the rest of his life. He hated the Rangers, and then we go there and win. Oh my God!”
Leaving New York to join St. Louis proved to be a lucrative moment, but Keenan acknowledged in hindsight, he wished he’d tried harder to stick it out with the Rangers, so they could have a go at defending the Stanley Cup. But life doesn’t give you do-overs.
Keenan tells a few interesting tales about the Rangers’ ’94 Cup celebration, including the fact that a New York entrepreneur named Donald Trump crashed the postgame party in the dressing room — and Esa Tikkanen responded by dumping champagne all over Trump’s carefully styled hair.
“I asked Tik, ‘How did (Trump) get in the dressing room?’ and he said he didn’t know — that Tik was just standing there, doing an interview and Trump was trying to have a conversation with him. So, he just turned around and dumped a bottle of champagne over his head. I didn’t see it myself, because I was in my office at the time, when Tik told me that, I just started laughing.”
Following his NHL career, Keenan went to Russia and coached Metallurg Magnitogorsk to the 2014 Gagarin Cup, which made him the first coach in history to win both a KHL and an NHL championship. From there, Keenan went to coach Kunlun Red Star in China. In October 2022, when it looked as if his career was over, Keenan was hired to coach Italy’s men’s national team, ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics. Italy gets an automatic berth as the host country and the federation wanted to build a competitive team. But then in February of this year, when Keenan was in New York, as a guest of the Rangers’ ahead of the outdoor game at MetLife Stadium he consulted a heart specialist, who warned him that he needed surgery within the next few months surgery to repair an aortal issue that he’d been monitoring for years.
“That was daunting,” Keenan said. “I asked the doctor if I had to have an operation, and he said, ‘Yes, if you want to live.’ So, I said, ‘I’d like to do that, so let’s get it done.’
“I came out of intensive care after six days. When you’re in intensive care, you’re in a single room, but once you’re out, you’re in a double room again. So, I walked to the second bed in the room, and I heard this voice from the other side of the curtain, who said, Keenan, is that you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s me.” It was Vinnie Viola, the owner of the Florida Panthers. He’s in there, for the same procedure. They were just starting the playoffs, so I walked him through everything, and then we talked hockey for about five hours.
“We were roommates. When the doctor came in to see me afterward, I said, ‘Doc, you did this on purpose, didn’t you?’ And he just started laughing. He deliberately put the two hockey guys together.”
More Ducks thoughts
The same day I was reading about Keenan’s flirtation with the Ducks, the other Anaheim item that caught my eye was our own story on the confidence level that fans have in the 32 NHL front offices — and how well the Ducks did, considering how many lean years in a row they’d had.
Pat Verbeek took over as general manager in February of 2022, at a time when the Ducks were 23-16-9 and tied for second with the Los Angeles Kings in the Pacific Division standings. The Ducks had three pending UFAs that year — Rickard Rakell, Hampus Lindholm and Josh Manson — and Verbeek traded them all away at the deadline, which effectively put an end to any hopes of a playoff push that year, but did result in a decent haul of young prospects and draft picks.
People may forget that at the time of his hire, Verbeek acknowledged that the Ducks had “good players in the NHL, good players in the minors, (and) also players that have been drafted, so there’s lots coming to support the growth of this team.”
That part of the Ducks’ rebuild can sometimes be overlooked: Before Verbeek’s arrival, they already had Troy Terry (2015 draft), Lukas Dostal (2018), Trevor Zegras and Jackson Lacombe (2019), Jamie Drysdale (2020) plus Mason McTavish and Olen Zellweger (2021) already in the organization. Verbeek’s three drafts have landed the Ducks, among others, Pavel Mintyukov and Tristan Luneau in 2022, Leo Carlsson in 2023 and Beckett Sennecke in 2024. Then of course last year, the Ducks swapped Drysdale to the Philadelphia Flyers for Cutter Gauthier, to add another promising young forward to the mix. In all, the Ducks have had six top-10 picks in the past six years, so there’s a lot of premium talent in the pipeline that hasn’t yet translated into consistent on-ice success.
Most of the good things that have happened this season can be attributable to exceptional work between the pipes by Dostal. In 1993, the Ducks were prepared to make a bold hire by considering Keenan to become coach and GM. You wonder: If they do decide to make a coaching change this season and move on from Greg Cronin, could there be a better way to spice up their rivalry with the Kings than to bring in Todd McLellan as their next coach? McLellan, fired by L.A. last year, would provide the sort of coaching experience and gravitas that could make an immediate impact on a team that — despite all that skill, looks and plays far slower than you’d think they would.
Final thoughts
Other than relocating to its new home at the Delta Center, and playing in an NHL arena again, the main reason for optimism for the new Utah HC was the revamped and improved blue line. Utah traded for Mikhail Sergachev and John Marina, brought in Ian Cole as a free agent, and re-signed Sean Durzi to a contract extension. So, a vastly improved top four from the group that played for the Coyotes in Arizona. Then Durzi hurt his shoulder in an Oct. 14 game against New Jersey, required surgery, and is out for four to six months. Marino, meanwhile, had lower back surgery — his timeline for recovery is three to four months.
In their absences, Sergachev is averaging a staggering 26:23 per game, tied for the league lead with Nashville’s Roman Josi, and Cole is playing over 20 minutes (20:34) on the second pair, alongside Juuso Valimaki. The only other defenseman playing above 26 minutes through Thursday morning was Washington’s ageless John Carlson (26:22). There are six more playing above 25 (Brock Faber, Jake Sanderson, Zach Werenski, Seth Jones, Evan Bouchard, and Quinn Hughes).
Dallas’s Miro Heiskanen is at 24:58 and weirdly, quirkily, does not have a single point through the team’s first seven games this season. That’s largely a function of Dallas’ misfiring power play.
They’ve only accumulated five total power-play points all year (Matt Duchene has two, Mason Marchment, Roope Hintz and Logan Stankoven had one apiece) — all of which translates to a power-play success rate of 9.5 percent. Amazing then that they were 5-2 heading into Thursday night’s date with the Boston Bruins. The only teams worse with the man advantage were Anaheim (at 8.7 percent, after scoring twice against San Jose on Tuesday night, and Buffalo, which was without a power-play goal through the first eight games of the season. Winnipeg, meanwhile, led the league with a 44.4 percent power play success rate, followed by Ottawa at 40.9 percent.
(Top photo of Mike Keenan: Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images)
