A dozen games into the Joel Quenneville era, the Ducks have already eclipsed much of their recent and regrettable history.<\/p>\n
Heading into a road trip that will send them onto Dallas to stare down the Stars and then to Vegas for a joust with the Golden Knights, the Ducks\u2019 current four-game winning streak matches their strongest surge from all of last season.<\/p>\n
Their league-topping offense, at 3.92 goals per game, has also put up a touchdown three times already this year. That\u2019s after having scored seven or more goals in a game just twice in the past three seasons under Dallas Eakins and Greg Cronin. Across the six-year span of those coaches\u2019 respective tenures, the Ducks had the lowest-scoring output in the NHL, a result they\u2019ve inverted early.<\/p>\n
Oh, and the bottom line? The Ducks are in first place for the first time in nearly five years. Their four-game spike was bookended by two wins<\/a> over a Florida Panthers team<\/a> in search of a three-peat and included victories against two other top teams from the East in the early going, the New Jersey Devils<\/a> and Detroit Red Wings<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWith every win comes more confidence. We can feel it in the room,\u201d forward Nikita Nesterenko said. \u201cEspecially when you get results against the back-to-back champs. When you put up seven goals on them, you know you feel good about yourself. Hopefully we can keep it going, keep the momentum, because hockey\u2019s all about momentum.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ducks haven\u2019t had a start this strong since 2014-15, when they reached Game 7 of the Western Conference finals against the Chicago Blackhawks, who were guided by none other than Quenneville.<\/p>\n For his part, the 67-year-old and winner of the second-most games in NHL history said he was enthused by how his young club managed a gauntlet of tough opponents, but far from satisfied.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a great homestand, you look at those three games, we did a lot of good things each and every night against good hockey teams. We\u2019re going to have to do the same thing going away,\u201d Quenneville said. \u201cI think our team\u2019s improving on a game-to-game basis \u2026 all aspects of our game, we\u2019re pleased with, but we\u2019re not content, we want to get better.\u201d<\/p>\n Cutter Gauthier\u2019s hat trick Tuesday catapulted him into a five-way tie for the NHL lead in goals. He and Leo Carlsson, who is in the top five in points per game leaguewide, each have seven-game point streaks.<\/p>\n Outside of the jettisoning of Trevor Zegras<\/a> \u2013 he has 15 points in 13 games as a Philadelphia Flyer, putting him on pace for a career-best campaign \u2013 the early going has vindicated Ducks GM Pat Verbeek, well beyond his decision to hire Quenneville.<\/p>\n His selections of Carlsson<\/a> and Beckett Sennecke<\/a> raised a few eyebrows, but both have only seen their stock rise, and more rapidly than anticipated. The addition of Gauthier via trade<\/a> from Philly has proven a masterstroke, while former New York Rangers like Chris Kreider<\/a> and Jacob Trouba<\/a> (both have three-game point streaks) have proven to be shrewd acquisitions.<\/p>\n Next up, they\u2019ll face a club that\u2019s been to three consecutive conference finals and four during this decade in Dallas and the 2023 Stanley Cup champs in Vegas. Both franchises loaded up with a prolific winger in his prime, with the Stars snagging Mikko Rantanen at the trade deadline and Vegas bagging Mitch Marner over the summer.<\/p>\n Ducks at Dallas<\/p>\n When: 5 p.m. PT Thursday<\/p>\n Where: American Airlines Center,\u00a0Dallas<\/p>\n TV\/radio: Victory+, KCOP (Ch. 13)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A dozen games into the Joel Quenneville era, the Ducks have already eclipsed much of their recent and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,824,165,164,404,127],"class_list":["post-39740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-ducks","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}