It did not take long for Greg Cronin’s first NHL team to carve out an identity … even if not’s exactly the one he’s going for.
Cronin, who spent the previous five seasons as the coach of the Colorado Eagles in the AHL, is in his first year as an NHL head coach with the Anaheim Ducks. The Ducks were one of the worst teams in the NHL last season but have been one of the feel-good surprises in 2023-24.
A big part of their success has been their six comeback victories — the most third-period comeback wins by an NHL team the first 15 games of a season. It led to someone on the club’s social media team dubbing them the “Comeback Quacks.”
No quit in this team 😤#FlyTogether pic.twitter.com/vEVipfvUwJ
— Anaheim Ducks (@AnaheimDucks) November 15, 2023
“It would be nice to be ahead in those games, but it’s just the way it’s gone,” Cronin said. “It’s cliche, but we constantly talk about process, process and doing the right things repeatedly. Whether you’re up a goal or down a goal, you probably have some degree of control over the outcome of the game. I think that’s the message they’ve bought into, but you don’t want to keep doing that. It’s a nice thing to have that, but I don’t want to keep chasing games.”
Anaheim is 9-7-0 this season after the Colorado Avalanche humbled it Wednesday night at Ball Arena. It was the second half of a back-to-back, and the Avs made sure there was no comeback this time with a dominant third period.
This is still a great start for a franchise that didn’t win its 10th game last season until after Christmas and was projected to finish near the bottom of the NHL standings again. It’s also not a surprise to the two guys with the Avs who know him best — Logan O’Connor and Jared Bednar.
“He’s a great coach. He cares a lot about the team and the players, and I think he expects a lot,” said O’Connor, who played for Cronin for two seasons with the Eagles. “He demands details and work ethic. When I had him in the minors, we never had the most skilled team, but it was never an easy night for other teams to play against us. I think you can probably expect the same from the Ducks now is to take a little bit of that personality from Coach Cro. You’re going to have to outwork them and outcompete them and in order to earn your chances.”
Cronin is a hockey lifer who spent a lot of time paying a lot of dues before he finally got this chance. He had 11 years on an NHL bench as an assistant for the Islanders and Maple Leafs, seven years as an AHL head coach and nearly two decades in college hockey.
While O’Connor is the only current Avs player who spent significant time with him in Loveland, Cronin’s Eagles did help develop guys like Ryan Graves and Alex Newhook, and he mentioned Jean-Luc Foudy as someone he sees helping the parent club in the near future.
“He gets the most out of his players. I think they appreciate his transparency, as he likes to call it,” O’Connor said. “He is pretty upfront. You know where you stand with him and everything in between. You see their work ethic with all these come-from-behind wins. It’s sort of a reflection of him as a coach. … He’s hard and demanding, but he’s also fun and he’s got a lot of personality.”
Cronin has one of the youngest teams in the league, highlighted by Leo Carlsson, Mason McTavish and Trevor Zegras, who is currently on injured reserve. He’s also dealing with some unique player development situations.
The Ducks aren’t just running all of those young players out there every game. It’s almost like the NBA’s load management idea, but with a player like Carlsson, it’s more to help him work on his body for future success on the days he’s not in the lineup. He still has six goals and eight points in 11 games.
And the Ducks are much pluckier to this point than most pundits expected.
“You create your coaching template based on your experiences and that kind of becomes like your franchise,” Cronin said. “Then you put that in Loveland and you work it in the AHL. Now I go here as a head coach and I’ve got to tweak it to an NHL team, but I’m trying to put roots in the ground here on how we’re going to play and identify the leaders who can play that way. We’re kind of in that process now.”
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