NHL coaching improvement not always rewarded
Duck! Here comes the axe!
- -By Bruce Penton
May 5, 2025
Key points from this story:
- Greg Cronin fired after two seasons
- Ducks improved by 21 points this season
- Team missed playoffs for seventh straight year
- GM Verbeek kept firing reasons private
- Ducks struggled with scoring and power play
- Joel Quenneville named new Ducks head coach
Greg Cronin probably deserved better than to be fired at the end of the 2024-25 National Hockey League season. After all, he led the Anaheim Ducks to an 80-point season (35-37-10), which was a league-leading 35.5-per-cent increase over the previous season’s disastrous 59-point campaign.
Cronin, probably among the least-recognizable coaches in the NHL outside of southern California, will deservedly get some coach-of-the-year votes but his relative success this season didn’t carry enough weight with Ducks’ general manager Pat Verbeek.
“I think I see this team at a point to where my expectation of this team is to make the playoffs next season,” Verbeek told Yarkbarker.com.
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