I don’t want to repeat, but there is a lot of money ($5B) being pumped into the Honda Center and OC Vibe by the Samuelis.
I heard the Honda Center is hosting an Olympic event in 2028.
If the league is allowing Quennebille to return to coaching, and the Ducks organization believes he is the best option, it is the correct business move to hire him and make the Ducks a contender.
John
Look, no one's opinion on the matter is invalid but I find it quite tiring that there's this presumption that just because Quenneville has a history of success, it is the best path toward contender-ship. The Ducks organization thought Cronin would (at least from a developmental perspective) bring us success and the results weren't exactly glowing.
I've made my feelings known on the moral implications and optics and I'm tired of talking about all that. If the hiring goes through I'll have plenty of feelings about it then.
But purely from a hockey perspective, Quenneville's best performance came when he had stacked rosters to work with. The Chicago cup winning teams, as much as we hated them and hated hearing about them, they were stacked with top talent. Quenneville's brief run with the Panthers was successful in terms of on ice performance but that was the beginnings of the current Panthers core that won the cup last year (Barkov, Gudas, Forsling, Bennett, Montour, Verhaeghe, Ekblad Luostarinen and Huberdeau+Weegar instead of Tkachuk). The Ducks are still developing their youth core and constructing a roster around it. The team is really not close to those Chicago or Florida teams.
This idea that Quenneville will arrive and we'll become a contender in short order is so naive to me. If Dostal keeps developing to solidify himself as one of the three best goalies in the league and we see massive spikes in development from the youth core, maybe then we're about three years out from seeing the Ducks as serious cup contenders. By that point Quenneville will be 69 years old going on 70. It's been brought up before but the oldest coach in NHL history to win a Stanley Cup was Scotty Bowman at 68 years old. Before he set that record, the oldest coach to do it was 55. Bruce Cassidy would've broken that record at 58 years old if not for Bowman.
I know what you're really saying is we need the Ducks to be competitive again, but that can be achieved with any number of these names and that's all, again, not touching any of the extraneous stuff related to the Blackhawks scandal.
