Surging Ducks set to meet ‘retooling’ Rangers
ANAHEIM –– As the Ducks tuned up for their second and final meeting with the New York Rangers this season, the storyline was a tale of two general managers.
The Ducks’ Pat Verbeek could continue basking in the afterglow of an off-the-board lottery pick, winger Beckett Sennecke, that panned out famously. Meanwhile, the Rangers’ Chris Drury hasn’t been able to do much right as he continued a curious relationship with his personal stationary.
Last season, he sent a memo out to all 31 franchises that the Rangers were willing to deal away the leadership core that took them to the conference finals in 2022 and 2024. That benefitted the Ducks, who acquired a top-four defenseman, Jacob Trouba, and top-six forward, Chris Kreider, at cut rates. In the duo’s return to Madison Square Garden, a 4-1 win for the Ducks on Dec. 15, Trouba had an assist but Kreider was held scoreless.
On Friday, Drury put pen to paper again, this time informing Rangers fans that a “retool” was forthcoming.
That likely signified the departure of pending free agent Artermi Panarin, at a bare minimum. Last season saw the jettisoning of not only Trouba, the Rangers’ captain, and Kreider, one of the Original Six franchise’s most prolific scorers ever, but of more than a dozen players. They included big-ticket defenseman K’Andre Miller and former No. 2 overall pick Kaapo Kakko.
It’s hard to call that anything less than a teardown, and the man at the center of last year’s frantic shuffling, current captain J.T. Miller, has underachieved in nearly every facet of his game. That’s been so even taking into account his ongoing outburst of 10 points in 10 games.
The Ducks have been through the pain of ripping apart their own group of two-time conference finalists, from 2015 and 2017, and are now firmly in the ascent phase of their build. That’s been thanks in no small part to Sennecke, who was a shadowy riser that skyrocketed all the way to third overall in 2024. Not only was the hockey world surprised, Sennecke himself was flabbergasted.
Yet this season, Sennecke ranks second among all NHL rookies in goals (one shy Montreal’s Oliver Kapanen), points (three off Montreal’s Ivan Demidov’s total), and assists (seven behind Demidov).
Sennecke deepens his bag of tricks seemingly every match. He has a five-game points streak going and had an eight-gamer earlier this season.
During the Ducks’ active three-game surge he scored the game-winner versus Dallas, factored into both goals before converting in the shootout against the Kings on Friday, and then assisted on the game-winning goal after negating a breakaway and stealing the puck during overtime of Saturday’s rematch.
“It’s been fun to watch him grow each game. It seems like every game he’s taking little steps. This last weekend, he was unreal,” Mason McTavish said of Sennecke, whom he called “super dynamic”
While Sennecke was the most utilized attacker for the Ducks by a wide margin on Friday, that title went to Mikael Granlund on Saturday. He logged 24:32, the highest time on ice for a Ducks forward this season. He fired the puck home following Sennecke’s jaw-dropping defensive play in OT, and also noticed the dividends that Verbeek’s perspicacious pick has already paid for the Ducks.
“This guy’s a gamer, you can tell. He just wants to play. He’s all over the place. He wants to play with the puck and he’s physical,” Granlund said. “He has good size, but the first word that comes to mind is a gamer, he wants to be out there all the time.”