Stop paying attention for a couple of weeks and what happens? The team that looked to be on the brink of firing its coach and declaring its latest rebuild a bust ends up challenging for the Pacific Division lead. That’s right, friends. The Anaheim Ducks are back on...
The Kings and Colorado faced off in LA on Wednesday night—weird for the LA team but necessary to be on US national TV—and this gave IH a chance to reflect on a couple of things. First, the Avs seem lost in a way, their roster made up of nearly unrecognizable...
The Kings have once again shifted their lines around, but it’s more a matter of maximizing what they have than punishing anyone. After all, the team has won two games (coming into Thursday, when the Wild came to town) since losing to the Senators and enduring the...
Ducks fans aren’t typically an incredibly noisy bunch. That’s not a knock. They just like to enjoy their hockey with a little bit of a demure demeanor. But when the Kings come to town, look out. Take Sunday night. Iven though the arena in Anaheim wasn’t full when the...
The big news in LA, the news that trumps all other news: we finally have a football team. Wait. This is Inside Hockey, so you probably don’t care about that. Me neither. No, it was this: number 11 is now and likely forever will be an LA King. You know the guy—the...
The Ducks exploded for three goals in a few minutes near the end of their Wednesday game to beat Ottawa. The explosion continued on Friday with the high-scoring (and high-goal-allowing) Dallas Stars on the first night of a California roadtrip that will take them...
The Ducks have five fewer points that the Ottawa Senators, but they sit one spot in their division higher than the Sens sit in theirs. Ottawa was 6th in the Atlantic with 46 coming into Wednesday. The Ducks were fifth in the Pacific with 41. They were just three...
The Ducks have three issues on defense. Cam Fowler is out. Simon Despres is just back from concussion, skating but not playing yet. And Stoner is back, but he’s been off for three games with a lower body injury. Not that the team has done poorly for these...
I don’t know what Dean Lombardi got for Christmas, but it’s the time for new toys, so it’s perhaps not surprising that in the week after New Years’, he unwrapped a couple of good ones called Vincent Lecavalier and Luke Schenn. It wasn’t that the Kings didn’t need...
There was magic in the Pittsburgh offense versus LA Saturday afternoon, but two things made it fail: not enough of it, and a goalie in Jonathan Quick who was better than the shooters the Penguins offered. Witness this: at one point in the game, the Pens had just 3...
It’s definitely a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full being an Anaheim Ducks fan right now. On the one hand, they’ve had a historically bad start, though it’s hardly sensible to talk about starting when the NHL season very rapidly approaches its midpoint with the Ducks...
What’s up with LA? Not the people, nor the city—the hockey team. Coming into Tuesday, they’ve won two of the last three and gained a point in the other. They lost two before that, but back to mid-November, they’ve won five of eight and had one OT point. So that’s 11...
Black Friday was good to the Blackhawks. It took Chicago just 1:14 to dismantle the Anaheim Ducks Friday afternoon. That’s the span of time between their two goals, scored late in the going to tie the game at two apiece and send it to OT, which the Blackhawks won. LA...
The first year you live in California, assuming you move there as an adult, is weird. The calendar says “Thanksgiving,” and people are acting like it’s late November. But you’re driving around with your car’s air conditioning on, and the only difference in the weather...
Rickard Rakell played on a line with Corey Perry and Ryan Getzlaf for the first time in his career on Wednesday night. The former two guys were responsible for two goals and two assists respectively, though the first of those was on the power play. This is a...
The LA Kings lost at home Tuesday night 3-2, beaten by a veteran who used to play for them, Brad Richardson, but really defeated by what their coach indicated was a soft effort on defense. In fact, he was so disappointed about what happened, he got mixed up about it....
Ketchup bottle. Chain reaction. Turning the corner. Getting their game back. Call it any of those or something else, the people following the Ducks this week have had their faith in their team restored. Somewhat. Their four leading scorers coming into Friday night...
Nashville might have been tired coming into Sunday evening against the Ducks, but hey, they’d played at 1pm Saturday, so it was more than a 24-hour turnaround to Sunday’s 5pm start. And, given the percentages which say that goalies on the second half of a back-to-back...
For the first week of the season in LA, it looked, in the immortal words of Ernest Thayer, like “there was no joy in Mudville.” Nothing was going right, and the hockey team wasn’t winning. People were starting to ask if the Sutter era was over. How silly that was is...
For a team that went all the way to within a game of the Stanley Cup finals last spring, the Ducks couldn’t look much less familiar, or a whole lot less skillful, than they do this fall. The lineup is full of new faces due to trades, losses in free agency, and injury....
Everyone else is running away from the LA Kings, with even the Minnesota Wild, not most people’s pick for the Central Division crown prior to the season. Heck, even in numbers, the Kings are lagging nearly everyone. Three games, no wins, two goals, twelve given up, no...
Awful. There’s little more to say about the LA Kings’ performance thus far this season. Blame one of several things, as fans and media members have done in LA this week. Pick from the goalie, players lagging on the system, or the line combinations. The team has an...
No miracles were forthcoming for LA on Wednesday night as they took a dispiriting loss to an energetic San Jose team to open the season. 5-1 was the final, and the numbers did no favors to LA. Twenty shots, though they gave up 32. On the power play, 0/6. More faceoff...
Francois Beauchemin left Anaheim for Colorado this summer, and one adage he followed was, “You can’t take it with you.” Anyway, not when “it” is your home. So, according to the OC Register of last weekend, he put his pad on the market. Knowing the details will remind...
Aside from the specifics of what happened in the Chicago-Ducks game Saturday night, which I detailed in my story “Down for the Three Count” at IH, other things stand out from this series. First, the Blackhawks were quite concerned to avenge last season’s game seven...
Three things needed to happen for the Ducks to win against Chicago Saturday night. Their coach needed to be smarter than the Blackhawks’ Quenneville. Their goalie had to be at least solid if not great. And their captain had to play better than he had, you could even...
One small lineup change shouldn’t make a huge difference to a team, but on Monday night, taking one guy out of the lineup (Etem) and inserting one other (Fleischmann) made a huge difference in mojo for the Anaheim Ducks. The home team also got major production from...
Chicago’s got problems on defense. Hard to imagine, but with only four serviceable players on the blueline, they were threatened if the Ducks came out Tuesday night and pounded them. Four men can only take so much. Of course, they dressed six, not four, but the final...
“Now the focus is off Andersen,” someone from the local Anaheim newspaper said this weekend. It didn’t take long for a bright LED spotlight to find the Ducks’ netminder again on Sunday afternoon. The first period of the Chicago-Ducks game was characterized by three...
“Don’t live in the world of what if,” my mother used to say. I was a worrier, and the more speculation I could entertain about what might happen, the happier I was. Her advice sought to rescue me from myself, and she was right. But just for a moment, I’m going to...
