The Outlook of the Anaheim Ducks Power Play
The Ducks have been one of the worst power play teams for the better part of a decade. With the talent on the roster, that will hopefully change in the near future.
The Conference Final matchups are set for the 2024 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs. The New York Rangers will face the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers will take on the Dallas Stars.
The four remaining teams all deserve to be where they are in their playoff runs. Several aspects led them to where they are; each has key similarities to one another that have contributed to their success thus far. The facet that jumps out most is their power plays.
During the 2023-24 regular season, the Rangers (26.4%), Oilers (26.3%), Stars (24.2%), and Panthers (23.5%) were four of the top eight teams in the NHL in terms of power play percentage.
The Anaheim Ducks have missed the playoffs for six consecutive seasons. During that time, the highest they've finished among league leaders in power play percentage was in 2021-22 when they finished 14th at a 21.9% rate.
"In the NHL, penalty kills are good," Ducks forward Troy Terry said toward the end of the 2023-24 season. "You have to be structured and reliable. When you get into trouble, you have to know where your outs are and where to support."
On May 14, the Ducks announced several Hockey Operations changes. Among those announcements was that the contracts for assistant coaches Newell Brown and Craig Johnson would not be renewed.
Newell Brown was brought in as an assistant coach prior to the 2021-22 season and part of his responsibility was to coach the power play. While the power play in 2021-22 was the most successful it had been since 2015-16 when they finished at the top of the NHL, it became stale and predictable quickly.
On the ice, the Ducks' power play had been traditionally stationary. All five players had their specific areas or lanes on the ice and rarely strayed from them as they moved the puck within the zone in search of a shooting lane. They moved the puck along the perimeter of their umbrella and settled for many long-range shots, seldom finding lateral seams in the opposing penalty kill to exploit.
The most successful power play units in the NHL who play relatively stationary schemes like the New York Rangers or Tampa Bay Lightning move the puck with incredible precision and speed while finding those seams from flank-to-flank, flank-to-bumper, goal line-to-flank, etc.
The Edmonton Oilers and Dallas Stars deploy active and kinetic power play schemes with a lot of off and on-puck player movement. Players will weave, shift, and switch their positions at a breakneck pace to open up shooting and passing lanes.
Over the past few seasons, the Ducks would deploy two power play units with each receiving relatively equal time within the two (or four) minutes of a power play. The units were on a merit-based arrangement where whichever unit was performing greater at a given time would get the nod to start the team's next power play.
Most of the power plays with the highest success rate in the NHL deploy a clear top unit for roughly 65%-75% of a two-minute power play.
On the 2024-25 Anaheim Ducks roster (barring trade), they will have offensively talented forwards like Leo Carlsson, Trevor Zegras, Mason McTavish, Cutter Gauthier, Troy Terry, Alex Killorn, Frank Vatrano, and several others currently on the roster or to be added during the offseason. On the blueline, they'll have talents like Olen Zellweger, Pavel Mintyukov, and Cam Fowler in their nightly lineup. They'll have more than enough skill, potency, and flexibility to form a dominant power play unit (or units) and create an effective scheme for them to run, in whichever style of a scheme that may be.
Whichever coach ends up in Anaheim to coach the Duck's power play will likely be salivating at the prospects of structuring out a system with the amount of high-end yet malleable skill on the Ducks' roster.