Brian Dumoulin signed a two-year contract with the Seattle Kraken on July 1, 2023 carrying an AAV of $3.15 million and a 10-team no-trade clause. Just before the 2024 draft, Dumoulin and his camp approached Kraken general manager Ron Francis requesting a trade, preferably to a team on the East Coast.
Decision Time for the Ducks: The Brian Dumoulin Conundrum at the Trade Deadline
On July 2, 2024, Seattle granted part of his wish by trading him, but instead of to a team on the East Coast, he was traded to the Anaheim Ducks in exchange for a 2026 fourth-round pick. The initial thought surrounding the acquisition was that he would provide a quality, winning, veteran presence to a young blueline and could ultimately become a valuable trade piece come the 2025 NHL trade deadline.
“The first thing you look at is obviously you want to go to a contending team. I mean, that's the initial thought. For me myself, I want to win and I want to be on a competitive team,” Dumoulin said after Monday’s practice when asked about his initial thoughts upon his trade to Anaheim. “Second, I hear how much guys love playing here and stuff. There are some travel logistics that I've heard about when talking with other guys that obviously aren’t ideal when playing here, but there's a lot of travel. It's far away from home. This is about as far as you can get from Boston.”
We’ve now arrived at the trade deadline and the narrative surrounding Dumoulin and his future seems to have shifted. He, through his agent, has expressed to the organization that he sees Anaheim as a place he’d like to stay and the two sides have engaged in contract extension talks.
So what changed?
The Ducks have 23 games remaining on their schedule and are six points out of the second wild card spot in the Western Conference standings, chasing the Utah Hockey Club, St. Louis Blues, Vancouver Canucks, and Calgary Flames. They have an uphill climb to reach the playoff picture, but that they’re even in the discussion in early March is more than most expected from this team.
“The group's awesome and the group wants to win, and I can see that,” Dumoulin said when asked about what shifted in his mindset regarding his future in the time since he arrived in Anaheim. “We could feel that, especially this last month. When we play this good hockey, we show our group what we're capable of, and that should be the expectation every night, so we've laid a blueprint of how we have to play if we want to win and win consecutively.”
Dumoulin expressed that he’s been taken aback by the community, organization, and fan base that resides in Orange County. Those aspects compounded with the fact that he, like several Ducks players, has a young family could be shifting his opinions on his potential future in Anaheim as well.
“I mean, obviously the weather’s great here, the fans are very passionate. That's one thing I didn't know, especially coming in these last few years,” Dumoulin continued. “It’s tough to have a passionate fan base when you're going through a rebuild and not selling out every game. I was used to that in Pittsburgh and Seattle, but you can see just a die-hard following here of this team and the Ducks. I didn’t realize how many loyal, passionate fans they have here.”
Dumoulin is part of a Ducks blueline facing a logjam of talented, NHL-caliber defensemen who all shoot left. Because the Ducks seem committed to playing defensemen on their strong side, either Olen Zellweger or Pavel Mintyukov have been asked to serve as healthy scratches on a nightly basis.
Logjam aside, Dumoulin fits what the Ducks are trying to accomplish from an on-ice perspective perfectly. He’s a prototypical, mobile modern day defensive-oriented defenseman who has intangible leadership qualities and stresses the importance of communication within the locker room and on the bench.
How Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek handles the next few days in regards to Dumoulin’s future will be remarkably telling toward his intentions and opinions of his roster.