Can close regular season wins finally mean playoff success for Bruce Boudreau?
ANAHEIM, Calif. – Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau is definitely not one for understatements in any form or fashion.
He shoots from the hip (or gut if you prefer to go there), but ultimately he says what’s on his mind and does skirt around an issue. Especially the fact that the Ducks have won a ton of one-goal games of late.
“In a perfect world we would like to win a couple 4-0 games, but until we do it’s better than the alternative,” Boudreau said after a Ducks 5-4 shootout victory over the Winnipeg Jets that moved Anaheim to 21-0-6 in one-goal games this season.
The Ducks are a strange team this year. Their goal differential is mediocre, scoring 2.67 per game, to allowing 2.65 per-contest. For non-math majors that’s 0.02. Imagine if that was Gail MacDonald’s million dollar math skills question from Safeway.
Anyway … rant about Safeway over.
Somehow they’re one of the top teams in the NHL, duking it out with the Predators for Western Conference supremacy, and a virtual lock to make the playoffs. But there’s something that this team needs to prove in order to not turn into the next San Jose Sharks – a team that dominates the regular season, seems to make all the right moves and then flames out in the postseason. It needs to win in the playoffs, and Boudreau, more than anything needs it for his on legacy as a coach.
Boudreau is much-liked around the league as much for his talkative nature, Kingpin –like looks, but in a more lovable way. The ice cream scene in the 2010 HBO 24/7 series was classic.
But he hasn’t had a lot of postseason success. The furthest the man they call ‘Gabby’ has gone in the playoffs in the second round.
Boudreau had some tremendous regular season teams with the Capitals. But were they not tested enough in the regular season?
For example, the 2009-10 squad that had 121 points and 50 goals from Alex Ovechkin scored 3.82 goals per-game in the regular season and allowed 2.77 per-contest. And then it lost in seven games to a red hot Jaroslav Halak and Montreal in the first round.
Boudreau tried to change to a more defensive structure the following year and again never made it past the second round. He was canned in 2011-12.
His pattern with the Ducks was pretty similar in his one 82-game season in Anaheim. A team that scored 3.21 goals per-game in 2013-14 and allowed 2.48 was beaten by a Los Angeles Kings team that had a tighter scoring differential at 0.37 to Anaheim’s 0.73.
While it may sound a bit odd, the Ducks believe that not being as dominant from a scoring perspective could lead to a greater potential in playoff success..
“I think it’s good. I think you want to have games where you play really well and you shut out teams and dominate teams,” forward Andrew Cogliano said. “I think at the end of the day it’s going to put us in a good spot when close games come in playoff time.”
Maybe Cogliano is right, and maybe Anaheim’s proximity to nail biters could turn into a winning formula for Boudreau. But it would be a statistical outlier.
In 2011, the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup after a regular season with a 0.68 goal differential. In 2012, the Kings had a 0.22 goal differential … but they allowed just 2.07 per-game. In 2013, the Chicago Blackhawks had a 1.08 goal differential. We’ve already mentioned the Kings were at 0.37 a year ago.
So really, Anaheim’s 0.02 goal-differential may not be a recipe for playoff success after all. If anything, it should lead to marginal regular season success and an early postseason ouster.
But who knows if that number will increase as Anaheim moves away from its dark period of the mumps.
The Ducks have dealt with injuries to Corey Perry and Francois Beauchemin – along with the mumps to those two and others. And they somehow still have the second-best record in the Western Conference.
Plus, they still have Ryan Getzlaf and Ryan Kesler.
Maybe this close-game formula is the one that finally pushes Boudreau over the top, if it doesn’t give all Ducks fans heart attacks first.
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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper
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