The Need to Knows
- The Time: 7pm PST
- The Place: Climate Pledge Arena in beautiful Seattle, Washington
- Place to Watch: KHN, KONG, KING-5
- Place to Listen: 93.3 KJR-FM
Game Preview
Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to Davy Jones’ Locker Room. Welcome to the first regular season gameday of 2025.
Welcome to the NHL season finally coming to the PNW. Let’s talk about it.
The Kraken are coming into this with a lot of physical injury. Seattle will have at least four to five major parts of their lineup unavailable for the upcoming season opener, and it will be a tough group to lose: Jared McCann’s goalscoring acumen is always sorely missed if they declare he will not be participating in a game thanks to his Day-to-Day status, Ryker Evans’ hard-nosed physical nature will likely see pale imitations in the months while he’s gone that may never see an active replacement, and who knows at what level Brandon Montour is going to be at to begin the season? It will fall on the depth of this team, several of whom are freshly graduated to the roster, to execute the admittedly pretty simple strategy of “attack the net like you’re trying to bury it in rubber” that Coach Lane Lambert espouses. Plenty of players showed their capacity to thrive in such a system over preseason; they just have to keep going now that they’re in the regular season.
The Ducks meanwhile…they’ve got a healthy enough roster, after all, they’ve gone and changed a lot of the composition of what makes an Anaheim Duck over the last season; they traded for Chris Kreider, they moved Trevor Zegras, they got Nikita Nesterenko and Mikael Granlund, they’ve locked down a sure-fire #1 defender in Jackson Lacombe, they’ll have a full season of Mason McTavish and Leo Carlsson under center, they will be graduating Becket Senneke and Cutter Gauthier to the main roster, and will no longer be wondering when Lukas Dostal’s time in the sun will come; it already has. Are they perfect? absolutely not. But they are unquestionably a different team than the one that they iced last year.
Oh yeah, and they hired Joel Quenneville as head coach.
Quenneville, for those who forgot, is the man who directly helped the Chicago Blackhawks become one of the very few modern dynasties; coaching the ‘Hawks to three Stanley Cups over six years. Teams he has coached, collectively, have only missed the playoffs a grand total of five times over the course of almost 30 seasons. He also was instrumental in allowing former video coach and registered sex offender Brad Aldritch; the man who sexually assaulted former Blackhawks player Kyle Beach, to evade consequences for his actions for as long as he did in order to successfully keep any “distractions” away from the main roster as they made their 2010 Stanley Cup run. He was banned from the NHL for a few years for his trouble, and then reinstated as the league determined that he, as well as Stan Bowman, were deemed fit to rejoin the league.
As for why Anaheim? I think the reason is obvious; they’re a smaller market, and they’re coming off of some truly heinous years of performance.
The Ducks post-Ryan Getzlaf/Corey Perry made the conscious choice to leave not only the playoffs but actively leave most discussions of the league in terms of relevancy for years on end. Further, they’re in the enormously crowded Southern California sports market, which has enclave after enclave of progressively bigger and bigger media spheres, and the SoCal hockey clubs are not high on that list. That might be mean to say; especially with the Kraken coming in at a distant fourth a lot of the time when it comes to people’s rooting interests, but it is true, and it serves a bigger point: That Anaheim is a smaller market with pretty much nothing to lose is something the NHL, and Quenneville himself, even if he’s not actively thinking it, are counting on.
Ducks fans are passionate, long suffering, but a small market. Could be a bigger market if this team ends up good, but right now it’s waning as hard as it ever has. Them sucking out loud even with the hire? It wouldn’t be any skin off their backs; that’d just be more of the same. Them being better, more competitive? That’d be a welcome change of pace. Them making the playoffs? Well, time heals all wounds, right? After all, it’s not Quenneville out on the ice most nights, right?
And hey, once the cameras fade away into the background about 20 games in, the Ducks settle into a rhythm, many of the people who initially cover the team will disappear into the background radiation of the league; looking for bigger stories, bigger topics, more profitable markets to keep an eye on. The distraction element of Quenneville will disappear. We might even forget he was even there to begin with.
That is probably what they’re counting on. I posit, we should not let them do that.
Redemption, if it can exist in a world as chaotic as ours, requires appropriate self-reflection and penance. I don’t think that Quenneville has done enough of that, and just because Anaheim may not improve enough in the standings to make the playoffs in his first year or two won’t be enough. I need genuine receipts of him working at what he did wrong.
On this particularly thorny issue, Quenneville gave a response to The Hockey News on the subject of what he has done to actively improve himself:
It’s been an ongoing process for over four years. I did a lot of work and talked to a lot of people. That’s an everyday thing and I think as a group here, we want to make sure that we’re going to apply these lessons as we go along here, and make sure that on our watch, something like that doesn’t happen again.
Joel Quenneville, on the process of wanting to help learn and grow regarding the treatment and advocacy of sexual assault survivors.
In a typical hockey non-answer; an observer can get whatever they want out of it. The optimistic observer will see a man who wants to learn from his mistakes and will be taking further steps to improve. A pragmatic observer will note that his vagueries allow him to say he wants to change without committing to anything, and the cynical observer will just see word salad trying to worm him out of a very uncomfortable question he was clearly not happy to receive. The cynic would also point out that he apparently failed to mention a single advocacy or care group in Southern California.
Those aren’t receipts, those are excuses. At least to my eyes
If there’s anything that the Ducks should do, if moving on from this coaching hire is not an option, is that Anaheim better have a running, on-going tally of where each player, coach, and staff member is and what they’re doing when interacting. Anything unaccounted for, any misbehavior, anything that does not show Quenneville and company as being a ship so clean you could reflect the sun off the deck and kill birds with it, and with transparency so fluid and natural it looks like glass, will end in total disaster for the organization. That goes double for if they actually improve to the point that they’re in the playoffs. The margin for error, especially for a team who’s owner is hellbent on getting them into the postseason, will be razor thin. Especially with the league having invited him back into the fold.
With so many recent scandals in the sport, both past and present, coming to light, the painful reality is that the league needs to make sure that repeat offense, or even the rumor of repeat offense, will be punished on a level we have not seen yet in this league. But that only comes if we keep the pressure on.
NHL Teams are not bastions of good decision-making on their own; like all professional sports teams, their morality is tied directly to their bottom line, and if their scouts and GM say they want to do something, they are going to do it. and will happily work themselves backwards to their justification. Their jobs are to make a team as good as it can be, and they will say whatever you need to hear in order to keep you from pulling your Season Tickets, and squeeze just the tiniest amount of points out of a player that they can for a shot at Glory.
It is, as always, up to us, the fans; the season ticket holders, the people who pay for the hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken tenders, the people in the stadium, the people who have made this sport what it is, for good and for ill, to make sure that teams actually do their due diligence and if they fail to do so; raise hell, and give them a good reason to undo their mistake, and prevent it in the future.
The game will be better for it.
Anyway, that’s my professional opinion. My unprofessional, fan-brain opinion is that the Kraken should drop 20 on them.
On a hard left turn out of serious talk, let’s enjoy game 1 for what it is; the endless promise of a new season bearing itself before us all.
LET’S GO KRAKEN, LET’S GO SQUIDS.