Ducks Season Preview: Behind the Bench

As Anaheim's season opener inches closer, now just two nights away in San Jose, our season preview steps behind the bench - where head coach Greg Cronin returns with three new faces on his staff.

Greg Cronin
Head Coach

Cronin returns for his second season behind the bench in Anaheim, hoping to help a young Ducks team take the next step towards playoff contention.

As Ducks fans learned early in his tenure, Cronin is an intense guy, someone who lives and breathes the game of hockey. That passion and drive is evident in everything he does, how he carries himself and how he wants his teams to play.

Cronin admits there were growing pains for him and his new players during his first season as an NHL head coach, but the tune in training camp at Great Park Ice has been different this fall as Anaheim's returning players know exactly what to expect from the fiery guy in charge.

"It was a learning curve for sure, not just with new systems but new drills," winger Troy Terry recalled. "It helps that us older guys know the drills now and we can show the younger guys the way...It's been a lot more seamless this year.

"And of course this year we have much more of a relationship with Cro and know what he's about. We know what he's looking for and it makes it a lot easier for us to do that."

"For the guys who have been here, it's been the same with a few minor adjustments [to the system]," Ryan Strome added. "It makes it easier on us, it's a little less thinking and a little more reacting. The execution will be higher because we're not thinking as much. So far, with knowing the standard and what to expect, we're one step ahead of the curve right now."

For Cronin, who said Anaheim's system will have "minor" tweaks this year, any successful team starts with a commitment to hunting loose pucks and taking care of defensive responsibilities first.

"It's interesting when you're out there and they already know the system, but you want to make a tweak, it's just a simple conversation," Cronin said. "They get it. When you don't have your systems in place, you're trying to adjust things that are new to them."

Cronin also added that, along with his usual offseason work studying his team and the game at large, he spent time trying to find the right balance between tough love and accountability.

"The hard part is when you're trying to create accountability within the group," Cronin said. "I can run hot. I can be reactionary. There's an expression: Hate the sin, not the sinner. Sometimes, I react to the sin and I get vocal about it. You don't want to ever accept mediocity, and I never will...I will never alter my framework of honesty, I have to be honest, but I don't have to be jagged or edgy.

"This is a different generation of kids and I have to adapt. I have to be respectful of that. But at the same time, I'm not going to compromise our standards."

Tim Army
Assistant Coach

Army, who served an assistant coach during the Ducks first four seasons in the NHL, returns to Orange County with a loaded resume amidst a life dedicated to hockey.

The coaching veteran has spent 15 seasons in the NHL as an assistant and a total of 14 as a head coach in college hockey and the AHL.

Army's experience has made an immediate impact for Cronin from the start of training camp, even helping to manage the most mundane of details in running an efficient practice.

"One of the days, we had overlapping ice," Cronin explained of the multi-team setup using both rinks 3 and 4 at Great Park Ice. "It's a long day and Tim has been a head coach for a long time, so he was able to recognize [we needed to make a change with the ice slots].

"He was doing a video session prior to the group going on the ice and, just as he's been around a long time, he recognized it and we kind of had a really easy transition to managing the first 20 minutes of the second group. So the could see that I missed it, he picked it up and he had organized the coaches that weren't on the ice with the current group so they just started the practice without me being there. [That's what I mean by] head coaches have to think in different levels."

Army will not be on the bench during Ducks games, instead sitting high above the ice in the press box for a birds-eye view while communicating with the other Anaheim coaches at ice level in real-time.

Brent Thompson
Assistant Coach

The other returning piece of Anaheim's coaching staff is Thompson, who oversees the team's defense and penalty kill. Thompson will certainly lean on his veteran trio of captain Radko Gudas, Cam Fowler and offseason acquisition Brian Dumoulin, while also trying to integrate a group of several talented young blueliners in Pavel Mintyukov, Jackson LaCombe, Tristan Luneau and Olen Zellweger.

Thompson spent nine seasons as the head coach of Bridgeport (AHL) before joining Anaheim, experience Cronin said he regularly calls on.

"Tommer has been through this and he's got a ton of experience too," Cronin said. "It's great having three head coaches (along with Tim Army) on staff. They think like head coaches. You have to think in different levels."

Thompson's sons Tage and Tyce each play in the NHL.

Rich Clune
Assistant Coach

Clune, also hired this summer, begins his first season in Anaheim after two years in player development and assistant coaching roles for Toronto (AHL).

In Clune's first season behind the bench, after joining partway through the 2023-24 campaign, he helped the Marlies to a Calder Cup Playoffs berth and helped improve the club's power play dramatically from 13.0% (10-77) when he arrived to 21.9% (43-196) the remaining 55 games.

"I think Rich is a really bright hockey mind with a lot of energy," GM Pat Verbeek said. "I want a lot more energy coming from the coaching group and I think he'll be able to provide that very well."

The 37-year-old Clune immediately joined the coaching ranks after a 15-year professional career, including NHL stints with Los Angeles, Nashville and Toronto. As a player, Clune helped the Marlies to a Calder Cup championship in 2018 while finishing his playing career as the club’s captain in 2020-21 and 2021-22. He also served as alternate captain in each of his previous five seasons with the club.

"He's able to speak the language of these players and see things from a different angle than I might see it," Cronin said. "I think it creates a different dimension.

"We felt it was important to have someone on the staff who was young and could identify what these kids are going through as they're playing. I don't have the Instagram stuff and the TikTok stuff, I don't operate in that network. They do. Not that that's going to be a conduit for their conversations, but it's just a reflection of where these kids are at. But to me it's important to have a guy like Rich who checks a lot of boxes. He played. He overcame a lot of personal crisis in addition to his professional crisis.

Cronin said he got glowing recommendations on Clune from across the NHL, including from former Toronto head coach Sheldon Keefe, former Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas and Predators GM Barry Trotz.

"When [Clune] spoke to me this summer, I was like 'Whoa, this guy really understands the game,'" Cronin said. "I was asking him questions about the minuteia of how to make a cycle work. What is the forward's responsibility when he goes to recover a puck? What's the closest forward's job when he does recover the puck? Those are questions that people might pause or want to look at the video, but he was like boom, boom, boom (snaps fingers). I was like 'damn, this kid knows his stuff.'"

Peter Budaj
Goaltending Coach

Budaj comes to Anaheim as part of a restructed goaltending department, now under the tutelage of longtime Ducks goaltending coach Sudarshan Maharaj, who was promoted to Director of Goaltending this summer.

Maharaj will now oversee all aspects of the organization’s goaltending, including coaching, development and scouting. Budaj and San Diego Gulls Goaltending Coach Jeff Glass will handle the day-to-day operations on the ice while reporting to Maharaj.

Budaj spent the last two seasons with Colorado (AHL), briefly overlapping with Cronin, following the completion of a decorated playing career.

"He understands the entire perspective of being a pro goaltender," Verbeek said. "I think he'll be able to relate really well to both our goalies. He's a very positive guy with good energy and he's very smart. He's got a unique background that I think he's going to be able to share with our goaltenders in terms of some of the adversity he's gone through. I think that's going to help our goaltenders from a mental perspective when things get hard, and in the NHL things are going to get hard."

Budaj played 17 professional seasons, including 368 NHL games with the Avalanche, Canadiens, Kings and Lightning. He posted a 158-132-40 record in the NHL, posting 18 shutouts, a 2.70 goals-against average (GAA) and .904 save percentage (SV%).

"He's an awesome guy who checks a lot of boxes," Cronin said. "He played a long time. He went through different teams. He went through a lot of crisis. You look at his record in the American Hockey League and I think one year he didn't win any games (0-9-7 in 2015-15 with St. John's) and the next year he set a record for wins (42-14-5 in 2015-16 with Ontario).

"I've watched him coach. I've watched how he communicates with his players. I watched how he manages the goaltending, how he builds a bridge from goaltending to the rest of the team in a very efficient way.

Cronin added that Budaj's significant, and recent, on-ice experience will also help the team's skaters, who can use the 42-year-old as a resource who sees the game from a different perspective.

"The guys respect him, he played a long time," Cronin said. "Guys will ask him what he thinks about certain things, in terms of improving their scoring chances. It could be from an offensive perspective, since Budaj played and knows what was effective in trying to make saves, and he can transfer that for a shooter.

"He's already made comments on things you wouldn't think to ever talk to your goalie coach about. They get put in a box. He's the goalie coach and he has his two goalies, but I don't believe in that. I think the goalie coach can have a huge influence on the team because a goalie always looks at the game differently, like a catcher in baseball. They see everything happen. We need to tap into that."