ANAHEIM, Calif. – Years ago, when he began his second stint with the Anaheim Ducks and they were in a run to the Western Conference final, Teemu Selanne conceived his now-celebrated theory about goal-scoring.
“You know how you can’t get the ketchup out of the bottle and you keep beating on it and beating on it, and nothing comes out,” Selanne said. “Then, all of a sudden, here it comes — splat!
“That’s how it is with goal-scorers. You have to be patient. As long as you keep getting your chances, you feel it’s going to happen.”
Ducks rookie Cutter Gauthier, who failed to score a goal in his first 16 NHL games, has learned all about the Ketchup Bottle Theory.
“I’ve heard it a lot,” Gauthier said on Friday morning as he prepared for the Ducks’ game against the Detroit Red Wings. “I heard it a bunch the other night at the fan fest. Everyone was coming up and saying it. Just kind of having that mentality. Just got to keep chipping away and eventually it’ll come. You get too mental with it, and it’ll affect your play. I can’t let that happen.”
Gauthier is a believer, and he finally enjoyed his breakthrough on Friday against Detroit with a third-period goal in the Ducks’ 6-4 victory. Gauthier got a pass from Drew Helleson and had a step on Detroit defenseman Albert Johansson as he blew through the left side of the ice into the Red Wings’ zone.
This shot was true — five-hole between the pads of goalie Alex Lyon. Gauthier scored on his 102nd shot attempt, after 44 missed the net (four of those hitting posts), 35 had been stopped by netminders and 22 had been blocked. But then Gauthier, 22, snapped aside weeks of frustration.
“Tendencies are, you have to try and get the puck off your stick,” Gauthier said as he described the play on the Ducks’ broadcast after the game. “I saw (the puck) jump up a little bit, so I just wanted to get it on net and not whiff and miss the net. So, I was glad that it went five-hole. It was just such a surreal moment.”
The Ducks had a restorative night in several ways. The group that had the fewest goals in the NHL put up a season-high six. Four of them came in the third period to cap a major rally from a 3-1 deficit.
But the night largely will be remembered for Gauthier ending his goal drought, followed by the huge smile on his face as he skated behind the Detroit net and the mob of teammates as he shook a gorilla off his back. As he has found out, the NHL is a different beast than the college game he mastered when he scored an NCAA-leading 38 goals for Boston College and was a Hobey Baker Award finalist.
“The biggest thing is just time and space,” Gauthier said. “It’s the best guys in the world and you don’t have a lot of time out there. I think it’s just the recognition of, when you do have time, to hold onto a puck to make a better play or when you just have to keep it simple and get it deep. Just play a more simple game.
“All the defensemen have great gaps, great sticks, so there’s very few times you’re going to be a guy one-on-one. You got to kind of outsmart them and just try to make the right play in the right situation.”
The Ducks saw the chemistry that Gauthier showed with Leo Carlsson in his NHL debut at the very end of last season, and they sought to revive it. While he has piled up shot attempts, Gauthier’s zest for letting it fly also resulted in a lot of tries that went wide or high. Bad luck also factored in, with him flubbing some one-timers or getting denied on grade-A chances at the net, in the slot or even on a clean breakaway. And with the team persisting in a scoring slump, Ducks coach Greg Cronin went into line-shuffling mode.
Part of that included Gauthier being dropped to the fourth line. It could be viewed as punishment by some, but Cronin wanted to take some pressure off the youngster and have him focus on developing more elements into his overall game.
“He had been very honest with me (saying), ‘I’ve really kind of been humbled by what goes on here in terms of how good the defenders are,’” Cronin said. “You talk about length. About how defensemen will keep their sticks inside their skates and invite you to walk to the inside and they’ll poke (the puck). There’s a lot of dictating and baiting going on that he’s not used to.
“I think about his game in college, which I saw enough games to get a sense of his identity. He’s a shooter. He’s a linear player. He’ll go down the dot line and try and drive wide and shoot pucks. If that’s the root of your game and that’s not happening for you, then what are you relying on? Have you been held accountable to forechecking and getting inside of people’s hands and getting pucks back? That’s something that he was not being held accountable to. He didn’t even understand the whole mechanics of it.
“Again, you can sit here all you want in the summertime and say this guy’s going to be this and play fantasy hockey. You don’t know until they get here.”
A lot of projections — including some we’ve made on this site — had Gauthier among potential Calder Trophy candidates, and his slow offensive start (six points in 16 games) has likely dropped him from tracking lists for now. Logan Stankoven’s ability to stand out on a deep and formidable Dallas club makes him an early favorite. But a hot week or month could propel Gauthier back into the conversation.
That’s what can happen for a shooter who is accustomed to beating goalies and lighting the lamp. They can run cold for stretches and then heat up like rocket fuel. Maybe that will happen for Gauthier now, or maybe it won’t. Right now, he is still attending NHL 101 class.
“Obviously, you can try and anticipate it mentally of what it’s going to be like, but you’ll never really know until you kind of face it or you kind of go through a drought,” he said. “As a goal-scorer, you’re scoring so much and everything’s going great and then when you don’t, you’re like, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ I think it’s just a consistent mental shift, that you have to keep on doing the right things and sticking to the process and that it’ll all eventually come.
“It’s been an adjustment for sure. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
Gauthier did enough good things Friday, beyond getting offensive chances, that Cronin moved him up to the third line, which is now without Robby Fabbri for six weeks after the veteran had knee surgery. Cronin wants Gauthier to have a backup game to rely on throughout his career when he’s not scoring. And Gauthier understands the value of adding more physicality and being defensively sound so that Cronin — and any other coach he plays for over a potentially long career — can trust him in any situation.
“He’s awesome about it,” Cronin said. “He understands it. I do think that when he scores his first goal, I think his game is going to take off. Really that’s his primary meal – scoring. He hasn’t had a meal the whole year. Once he gets that, I think his game will take off. Right now, he’s just learning to simplify it.”
In an optional morning skate, Gauthier was among those participating in a shooting drill on goalie Lukáš Dostál. Some pucks went right into Dostál’s chest and others hit the glass behind him. But one beat him into the top right corner. Another successful try hit the post and went in. A third low shot got past the goalie.
It was proof that Gauthier hadn’t lost his knack for scoring. Hours later against the Red Wings, he proved it. The Ducks hope the ketchup starts flowing.
“If you’re not scoring in games, you can’t let that affect you in how you approach the rink and your mentality every single game,” he said. “I just have the same mindset that I’m a shooter, I’m a scorer and when I do get my opportunities and they don’t go in, you’re just onto the next and you worry about the next thing. You can’t let it affect you mentally and you just got to focus on what you can and that’s the next play, the next shift.”
(Photo of Cutter Gauthier: Gary A. Vasquez / Imagn Images)
