A New Start?

Photo: Anaheim Ducks

Rewind the clocks back in the season, the dive began with a seven-game losing streak. It was rough and people were worried. Of course, the pitchforks came out and people demanded Randy Carlyle‘s head. But it stabilized and the Ducks started winning again. That was the first of three sequences of the nosedive this team was about to take. (The dive begins, there is an attempt to control it, and it slightly stabilizes.)

Then there was the big one… a very long and painful 12 game losing streak. This is the, “dives harder and faster” part of the list. I can easily go on and on about this streak. I could mention how they went a whole month without winning, how there was little feedback from the front office or management, how the fans felt unheard… the list during this time is near endless and rubbed a lot of the fans the wrong way.

During the nosedive was the “desperate attempt to stop it” and once again we see our Ducks following these footsteps. GM Bob Murray makes all sorts of moves in an attempt to stop this drop. He trades Andrew Cogliano to Dallas for Devin Shore, he sends Pontus Aberg to Minnesota for Justin Kloos, next he moves Joseph Blandisi to Pittsburgh for Derek Grant, and lastly he trades Luke Schenn and a 2020 7th round pick to Vancouver for Michael Del Zotto. All that in the span of a few days.

A lot of people were calling this a “facelift” or a “retool” but, again, it appeared to be a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding.

The fans were not happy with this. Cogliano was a fan favorite and, while there were rumors going around of behind the scenes issues, Aberg seemed to add a little bit of life to the Ducks’ lifeless offense.

This brought the Ducks to that, “one last brief moment of control” I mentioned earlier. They won two games in a row. The first against the Minnesota Wild and then two days later against the New Jersey Devils. That was the last time they won.

After that the floor dropped out from under them, causing them to plunge towards the bottom, and mirroring the list above in the final step. With the loss against the Philadelphia Flyers, the Ducks are officially in the last place in both the Pacific Division and Western Conference and are amongst the bottom teams in the NHL. They have reached their absolute lowest point and their stats reflect that.

They currently haven’t won a game since January 19th (when they beat the Devils) and are on a seven-game losing streak again, have lost 19 out of 21, and have only won 2 games in over 50 days! But that’s just scratching the surface of their issues. They’re currently last in the league when it comes to Average Goals For (2.21), are ninth in the league for Average Goals Against (3.21), and are twenty-ninth in the league for Power Play Percentage (14.9%), just to name a few issues.

This team is at an all-time low. This is their third longest losing streak in a single season and it’s still actively going. However, on Sunday Bob Murray stepped forward, fired Randy Carlyle (finally!), and will be coaching the team until the end of the season.

Could this be the new start that the team has needed?

They’ve looked dead in the water the last few games. Their opponents were skating circles around them and outscoring them significantly. But that could have been because the players lost faith in Randy, so dropping him could be the thing this team has needed to get its spark back.

The fans were demanding change for a while and their cheers of relief can be found all over social media for the past couple of days. And while removing Randy was the right move, Murray has never coached an NHL team before and this sparks a set of new questions:

What will happen now?

It appears the players didn’t play for Carlyle, will they play for Murray?

Could Murray’s job be in trouble for waiting this long to let Carlyle go?

Can the Ducks get much lower than this?

Are they going to sell off at the deadline and completely rebuild?

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