Seven years ago, there were trade rumors surrounding Ducks defenseman Cam Fowler. But Anaheim kept him around, utilizing him until they dealt him to St. Louis this season.

The Anaheim Ducks employed veteran defenseman Cam Fowler from his entry into the NHL in 2010 until they traded him this season to the St. Louis Blues. And in this story from THN's June 19, 2017 edition, writer Ken Campbell wrote about the Ducks' decision to keep Fowler in the fold:

BAIT AND SWITCH

By Ken Campbell

It's all-star weekend, where the game isn’t the only thing they play fast and loose, and it is indeed Cam Fowler’s first rodeo. Sitting on the window ledge of a skywalk in a downtown hotel conducting an interview, Fowler can relax a little. Until, that is, he sees a couple striding toward him and has to excuse himself. He straightens himself up and offers a handshake to the man and a respectful kiss to the cheek of the woman. They are Henry and Susan Samueli, owners of the Anaheim Ducks, and they’re on their way back from a board of governors meeting. (Susan jokes about the emphasis on bored and they all laugh at that one.) It’s always good to put your best face forward when you see the folks who sign your paycheque.

Fowler comes across as exactly what he is – a respectful, salt-of-the-earth, happy-to-be-here, all- American kid (even though he was actually born in Canada). As part of a social-media night a couple years ago, the Ducks had players read mean tweets about themselves, and Fowler’s went like this:

“Cam Fowler looks like every Chick-fil-A employee. I can’t help but want to punch his wholesome face.” The polite tone he takes with the bosses isn’t an act. At 25 years old and in the midst of a renaissance season, Fowler is a young man who has his priorities in the right order. When he goes home to Farmington Hills, Mich., for the summer, he hangs out with his buddies from middle school – not high school, but middle school. One is going to pharmacy school after graduating from Wayne State University, another is working in the advertising game and the third is the assistant pro at the golf course where Fowler is a member. 

“Cam is one of the most down-to-earth, disciplined, polite young kids I’ve ever played with or coached,” said former NHLer Pat Peake, who works with Fowler as a skills coach. “It starts with his family. They’re great people.”

There are two people Fowler trusts completely when it comes to hockey. One of them is Peake, who coached him in the famed Detroit Honeybaked organization where they forged a relationship that continues to this day. Within five minutes of the final buzzer of every Ducks game, Peake fires up his laptop, goes to a secure website, types in a password and just like that has instant access to each one of Fowler’s shifts. Peake then breaks down every movement, every nuance of Fowler’s game and the two of them talk about it on the phone. 

They also spend four days a week together on the ice in the summer. If Peake tells him to change the positioning of his hips or move his shooting hand lower down on his stick, Fowler follows the advice without question. “He would have been a premier goal-scorer if he hadn’t gotten hurt,” said Fowler of Peake, whose career ended in his mid-20s from an ankle injury. “He really opened my eyes to being able to contribute more offensively.”

The other person is Fowler’s father, Perry, a transplanted Canadian working in marketing and sales for Ford. While attending the University of Windsor, Perry met his Michiganborn wife, Bridget, when she went across the border with some girlfriends for a night on the town. Unlike Peake, Perry has no significant hockey pedigree. The son of a pastor for the Salvation Army, he was introduced to the game in Sudbury, Ont., where his father was stationed at the time. 

His first hockey was in the Sudbury Playground Hockey League, where in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a working-class kid with two bucks and a baptismal certificate could play in handme- down equipment for the entire season and get a free hot chocolate after every game. The tradeoff was fairly steep, though. All games and practices were outdoors in a place where minus-30 pretty much described the month of January. (Celsius or Fahrenheit, it doesn’t make much of a difference at that point.) It was a league that produced former NHLers Mike Foligno and Kevin LaVallee, New Jersey Devils director of amateur scouting Paul Castron, Toronto Maple Leafs scout Lindsay Hofford and your trusty correspondent. “I always tell Cam that I considered myself to be the third-best player on my team,” Perry said, “because only two players on the team ever scored a goal and I hit the post.”

When Perry told his son last summer to lengthen his stick by two inches and shoot the puck more, Cam listened. The results were profound. Fowler led all Ducks D-men in scoring, posting a career- high 11 goals and coming within one of the 40-point benchmark he set in his rookie season. Even more impressively, however, Fowler unleashed a total of 186 shots. That’s hardly Brent Burns or Dustin Byfuglien territory, but it was 63 more than his previous best. And of his 248 shot attempts, Fowler managed to hit the net 75 percent of the time, among the best totals for NHL defensemen and a noteworthy accomplishment in a league where coaches insist on shot blocking and collapsing in front of the goaltender.

More importantly, though, Perry guided his son through the most tumultuous time of his career last summer when it seemed almost a given that Fowler would be dealt from the Ducks, the same way his two best pals in the game, Kyle Palmieri and Nick Bonino, were. With salary cap and expansion draft implications, Anaheim could have dealt Fowler and everyone would have understood. In retrospect, it would have been a disastrous move for the Ducks. “There were times when he was thinking it was a foregone conclusion that he would get traded and he’d say, ‘I can’t leave the guys,’ ” Perry said. “It wasn’t easy by any means, but it was something he was starting to get his head around.”

Both Perry and Peake convinced Fowler to focus on only what he could control, such as shooting the puck and being more of an offensive thrust. That’s where Peake came in. Some changes were subtle, such as hip trajectory. Others were a little more pronounced, like waiting a split-second to get the puck off his stick, to find a better shooting lane, and if there isn’t one there, shuffle over to create one. “The thing with Cam is he tries to hurry things and he was putting himself in situations that were not good, where it was difficult, where he’d have to thread the needle,” Peake said. “A lot of the stuff we did this summer was deception, moving his body and his hips, the placement of his hands, while keeping his feet moving and his head up.”

Another thing Peake noticed was that Fowler was too far up into the play, a common occurrence for defensemen who can skate as well as Fowler can. Forwards now have a tendency to over-backcheck, which means they’re leaving lanes open for defensemen who are patient and have good vision. “A lot of times I’d be looking at the net and I’d see the goalie and say, ‘If I shoot this right now, this has no chance of going in. He can see me, I’m 60 feet away,’ ” Fowler said. “So it’s taking that extra split-second to maybe wait for some traffic to develop or for one of your guys to set a screen in front of the goalie. If you have a bit of zone time, you can stop the video and you’ll see that teams have five guys in the slot area. So there is room for our forwards to get it up to us at the blueline and when that happens, it’s up to us to make a play.”

But it’s about more than that for Fowler. The constant trade rumors didn’t help, and he admits there have been times during his career when confidence has been fleeting. The Ducks’ off-season coaching change required a reset for Fowler. He had a great relationship with Bruce Boudreau, and going back to Randy Carlyle, Fowler’s first NHL coach, meant a change in mindset. He remembered Carlyle as tough but fair, though more tough, and that took some getting used to. 

“I’d never played for a coach who was strict and demanding, so for me that was a bit of a tough thing to negotiate,” Fowler said. “Going into a practice, you know what it’s going to be like. (Carlyle) is a firm believer that practice carries over into the games. He wants passes to be on the tape, he wants speed. He demands that in practice as much as he does in a game. He might approach it in a different way than Bruce, but they both want to get the best out of their players. They just do it in different ways.”

Fowler continues to chase the goal of getting his name engraved on the Stanley Cup someday. If that happens, there’s a good chance he’ll take the chalice to the Orchard Lake Country Club, where his name is already etched on a plaque for winning the Flight No. 2 club championship for players with a handicap between five and eight. (He has it down to three or four now.) Winning the title required three days of match play, and Fowler was perfect through five matches. 

“He’s a pretty good golfer, but when we’re on the golf course, he knows who’s boss,” said Jordan Weinger, the assistant pro at Orchard Lake whose friendship with Fowler goes back to the Power Middle School in Farmington. “When things go south for him, he’ll go right out to the driving range or the short game area to make sure he doesn’t make the same mistakes the next round.”

A mulligan wasn’t possible for Cam Fowler, the baseball player, however. A shortstop, second baseman and pitcher growing up, Fowler played on the varsity team at Farmington High as a freshman and sophomore. He was that good. When he was being recruited to play U.S. college hockey, he and his father discreetly inquired about the possibility of playing baseball as well. Fowler’s team made it all the way to the state final in 2007, his sophomore year. He was brought in to pitch in the sixth inning of the championship game and got through it before getting into trouble in the seventh. 

The winning run came on a play at the plate after a seeing- eye single between the shortstop and second baseman. Fowler was off to the U.S. National Team Development Team the next season, so that was his last baseball game. “He’s a pretty easygoing guy, but he doesn’t like to lose,” Perry said. “In Cam’s own way, he handled it the way he always handles things. He doesn’t fly off the handle or get super upset, but you could tell he was disappointed. Like any loss, the sting goes away after a while, but I doubt that’s the way he wanted to end his baseball career.”

Alas, there have been plenty of triumphs since then. Fowler won gold medals at both the Under-18 World Championship in 2009, where he led all defensemen in assists and was named the tournament’s top blueliner, and the World Junior Championship in 2010, the same year he won the Memorial Cup with the Windsor Spitfires and made the all-tournament team. The all-star recognition for the first time in his career was a nice touch, and even though he’s only 25, the years go by quickly. He knows players get only so many chances to win a Stanley Cup.

About five games into this season, GM Bob Murray told Fowler he wasn’t going anywhere. But nobody really knows where things will go with the Ducks, who are precariously balancing on the upper limit of the salary cap. Fowler has one more year remaining with a team-friendly $4-million cap hit before he is eligible for unrestricted free agency. But again, as his father and Peake have stressed, he’s intent on concentrating on the tangible things he can control. 

“I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to block out that background noise and focus on hockey,” Fowler said. “When you don’t have confidence, it seems like you’re always searching for it. I always knew I had the ability, but when you have a clear mind, you’re a confident player. And that’s when you’re dangerous.”