They all had made a name. They just couldn’t find it on a Stanley Cup.
Teemu Selanne had put in 13 years, Chris Pronger 12. Todd Marchant and Rob Niedermayer had done 12 years, too, and Sean O’Donnell 11. Jean-Sebastien Giguere had been in net for eight years.
“We had been doing this a long time and we were hungry,” Marchant said. “Everybody came into that season with one goal in mind. And then we had Scott Niedermayer. He had been somewhere we all wanted to be.”
Niedermayer had won three Stanley Cups in New Jersey. He came to the Anaheim Ducks after the league-wide, season-long lockout was settled in the summer of 2005. The next year the Ducks traded for Pronger, the pterodactyl with the T-rex temperament.
Hunger was about to be eradicated in the Ducks’ lifetime.
The Stanley Cup champions of 2007 lost 20 games in the regular season and lost only five in four playoff series.
Niedermayer and Pronger are Hall of Famers and Selanne will be soon. Giguere was the king of playoff overtime. A frisky line of rookies that included Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Dustin Penner had the time of their lives, and then came dead-serious center Samuel Pahlsson, flanked by Rob Niedermayer and Travis Moen and, later, Drew Miller.
“Talking to other coaches after the fact, they couldn’t believe the pressure that we could put on teams,” said Randy Carlyle, then and now the Ducks’ coach.
“We led the league in penalties and there was an intimidation factor, but our mantra was to be a big, strong, skating team that attacked. We took pride in being able to play the game any way you wanted.”
Everyone has a snapshot. Marchant remembers a night in St. Louis when the Blues had a 5-on-3 for two minutes. “They not only didn’t score, they only had it in our zone for 15 seconds,” he said.
But the 212th degree of that boiling pot came from resolve. The veterans knew their time had come.
“It all started the previous year,” Marchant said.
The Ducks won 12 of their 18 regular season games to make the ‘06 playoffs, surprised Calgary in a seven-game first-round series, then swept Colorado.
Suddenly they had home ice for the Western Conference final as a No. 7 seed. Edmonton, the No. 8 seed, had knocked off Detroit. With Pronger running things from the back end and with goalie Dwayne Roloson rising up, Edmonton eliminated Anaheim in five games.
“We had to tip our hat,” Marchant said. “Roloson was exceptional, he stole that series. We looked at it as unfinished business. We traded for Prongs right after the season, so the season never really stopped. We picked up where we left off
“It was a close unit because of that. We’d go out for dinner and there’d be 14 guys. We felt we were destined to do more.”
The Ducks played 16 games before they lost one in regulation. On Dec. 20, they were 27-4-6.
Then they won close but quick series against Minnesota and Vancouver, survived a six-game crucible against Detroit, and then met Ottawa in the Cup final, led by Daniel Alfredsson, Dany Heatley and Jason Spezza.
“The media in Canada were ranting and raving,” Carlyle said. “We didn’t have an answer for that line, everybody said.”
Inside hockey, it was different. Mike Milbury was the general manager of the Islanders. He called Brian Burke, the Ducks’ GM, and said, “I’d like to apologize in advance, on behalf of the Eastern Conference. You guys will win easy.”
They did, in five games. Carlyle basically won it in the first game, when he played Niedermayer and Pronger simultaneously.
“It was like they said, ‘Holy crap,’” Carlyle said. “We didn’t have to do it often, but it established that we weren’t going to let them kick sand in our faces.”
Alfredsson scored four goals, but two were in the 6-2 Ducks’ win in the clinching Game 5.
“That was one of the joys of coaching,” Carlyle said. “We win a game to give us the Stanley Cup, and they had only 13 shots on goal. That’s when you’ve put a stamp on it.”
If there was drama, it came at the end of the second period of Game 4, when Alfredsson expressed his frustration by firing a puck at Niedermayer.
“We came into the room and everybody was hot,” Marchant said. “We said, ‘OK, who’s going to get him?’ That’s when Scotty got up and said nobody was.”
“We have bigger things in mind,” Niedermayer told the Ducks.
“I didn’t have to say anything,” Carlyle said.
Nobody did. The names, carved on the Cup, drowned out everything.
