It's easy to point to the coach, and for all I know he could be a major problem. But I liked him when he was an assistant with Toronto. I don't think he is so obviously terrible that it's killing the whole team's talent.
I think a huge issue is just a lack of vet presence and leadership. At forward they have who? Killorn and Ryan Strome?
On defence, I love Fowler. But he's not a superstar. And I don't think Gudas is captain material. I know Ducks fans like him in that role, and that's great. But I don't see it. Doesn't seem like his tenure is off to a great start. And there's not much depth after that.
The Ducks need more experience on their roster so that everything isn't just left to the young guys. They're expecting too much from Zegras/ McTavish.
Sure better veterans would help. But better veterans wouldn't change the fact that Cronin's systems are ineffective in today's NHL and even to the extent that they are suboptimal in this league he also doesn't drill them properly as the team routinely struggles to connect on passes and just throw it away under the most basic defensive pressure with two veteran forwards recently admitting that they rarely know where their linemates are going to be which is not helped by Cronin constantly throwing the lines in a blender because he routinely says he doesn't know how to fix the team's issues.
And the lack of cohesion, synergy, and panic under basic pressure being a symptom of poor systems and poor drilling of systems is backed up by Ilya Lybushkin's comments to the media that Cronin spent more time making the team watch motivational videos than drilling fundamentals and systems. On top of Terry and Killorn's comments about never knowing where their linemates are.
Better vets aren't really going to help the fact that Anaheim's promising youth have seen their development stagnate under Cronin. Rather than seeing gradual improvements every week, the Greg Cronin approach to being a development coach seems to be "repetition of failure is the best and only teacher these kids need" because every game the kids, even McTavish keep making the same f***ing mistakes without any discernible improvements in their game. And it wouldn't surprise me if Cronin's approach was really just "let the kids get experience and learn to play the right way by making mistakes" because he admitted that in the last 20 games of last season he stopped coaching to observe what the players would do and how they would improve if left to figure it out for themselves. A development coach. A
DEVELOPMENT. COACH. thought it was a good idea to not develop his young players for
20 GAMES and just let them "figure it out" that should have been a firable offense on its own. That's 1/4 a season and a huge chunk of a number of these kids' careers that a development coach intentionally didn't do his f***ing job.
Of course Cronin isn't the only problem. But the Ducks have finally put together a group of young players that could form the core of a team that eventually escapes a prolonged rebuild of they are developed properly. They seemingly aren't being developed on an individual basis and are surrounded by team wide ineptitude as their basis for learning how to be better players. Cronin is a f***ing disaster who admits publicly that he doesn't know what he's doing. He needs to go. Teams like Columbus, Chicago, San Jose are still bad, but they've made measurable improvements from last year. All you have to do is watch them, watch the Ducks this year and try to find a game from the last 20 games last year, and you'll see it. At best the team has completely stagnated but I would argue they have gotten worse.
