Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishPat Verbeek made his decision to fire Greg Cronin after just two seasons coaching the Anaheim Ducks on Saturday, a move the general manager said left the 61-year-old “completely shocked” when they met in Cronin’s office early Saturday morning.“Which is probably normal from his perspective,” Verbeek said, addressing the media later on his call to cut loose Cronin after a 21-point improvement over his first season. “And that’s why this was very difficult and probably didn’t make a lot of sense to him.“Maybe at some point I’ll be able to kind of dive in with him deeper than what I was able in some of the conversations that we had today.”It isn’t as if Cronin was on completely stable footing, given how the Ducks still had fundamental elements of their game that showed little to no improvement and inspired concern as to eventually fulfilling their goal of being a playoff team, which Verbeek put as his centerpiece on next season’s table. But it was fair for Cronin to think he’d be back for the third year of his contract and be around for the fruits of their laborious rebuild. (Assistant coaches Richard Clune, Brent Thompson and Tim Army remain in place, though their respective futures are in limbo.)Verbeek made his move, and now he’s on his second coaching hire. Add that to the moves he also must make to give his next coach a better roster. He has to get both right because now the state of the Ducks being more than relevant again is squarely on him.Anaheim should be an appealing job. There is talent, and a lot of it is still on the come-up as to where key players are in their careers. Candidates can see how Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier flourished as a playmaker-shooter duo in the second half of the season, Mason McTavish looking more like the impact center they long imagined, Jackson LaCombe ascending as a top-pairing defenseman and Lukáš Dostál showing legitimate No. 1 goalie upside. Sam Colangelo and Drew Helleson showed they can be NHL players.And there’s a pool of players still to develop into strong contributors now and into the future, whether it’s Pavel Mintyukov and Olen Zellweger on the roster now or Beckett Sennecke, Tristan Luneau and Stian Solberg as roster hopefuls next season. The next coach will have a lot to work with. Verbeek threw some praise Cronin’s way in laying a foundation for his successor to build on. “Today was a very tough day for this to happen, and I think Greg was responsible in many ways for the improvement of this team,” he said.But it’s now on Verbeek to find the right complement to that young talent and the right bench boss to maximize its potential. The Ducks remain a team that’s very inconsistent from night to night — and even period to period — while remaining defensively deficient and too reliant on their quality netminding. A putrid power play and below-average penalty killing are direct evidence of underperformance for the ability they can put on the ice.“I think that from my perspective, the team’s right on course and we’re improving,” Verbeek said. “Sometimes you have to look at scenarios to where a voice is needed to push this group to another level. You look at the teams that are in the playoffs, we need 10 more wins and that’s what we need to figure out to get done for next season. So, I’m going to look for those answers with the new coach.Later, Verbeek continued with the theme, saying, “We have a diverse roster in the sense we’ve got some good older players and we’ve got some really good younger players. Melding them in, them being in different stages of their careers, is obviously difficult in the sense that older players need less, younger players need more. Can I find the guy that can meld that development and that diverse roster into a cohesive unit to where the young kids are impactful and even the veterans are impactful? That’s kind of, in a sense, what I’m looking to do.”With a salary cap rising to $95.5 million for 2025-26, the Ducks enter the offseason with what CapWages estimates will be more than $39 million of cap space available for usage. Verbeek has managed the Ducks for this moment, where they can flex some financial muscle. The problem for the Ducks is that free agency looks to be a depressed market after Mitch Marner, and that’s if the Toronto Maple Leafs star makes it to July 1.It isn’t clear if Marner is a target, but so was Mikko Rantanen until those dreams were dashed when he signed an eight-year extension worth $96 million with Dallas after the Stars acquired him from the Carolina Hurricanes. Verbeek was rebuffed in his efforts to land Steven Stamkos and Jonathan Marchessault last summer, but he’s planning on big-game hunting once again.“I expect us to be very active and aggressive,” Verbeek said. “I think I see this team at a point to where my expectation of this team is to make the playoffs next season. I expect our group to take a step and so I’m going to be active and aggressive in making our team better.”Can he deliver on that? This year is a defining one for Verbeek, who became a first-time NHL general manager in February 2022 after being an acolyte to Steve Yzerman in Tampa Bay and Detroit. His signings have been mostly about insulating his growing young core with established around-the-league veterans. Ryan Strome, Frank Vatrano, Alex Killorn and Radko Gudas can be fine players when slotted properly in a lineup. None of the four are stars. And the Ducks need that. They need an alpha that can drive the team.Maybe one emerges from within. That’s ideal. It’ll be more cost-effective that way. If Verbeek can’t land one from the outside, he’s got to bring one in through free agency or trade a forward that can produce. Throughout his 20-minute Zoom call, Verbeek was light on specifics as to firing Cronin or the qualities he wants in his next coach. He identified more offense as one area to fix. The Ducks were 30th in goals with 217.“I think when you look at the roster (as) a whole, we need to score more goals,” Verbeek said. “Ultimately, we didn’t score enough goals and certainly that became a contributing factor. When we scored three or more goals, we virtually won all the games. We were almost undefeated with scoring three or more goals. So that is going to be a goal that we’re looking to hit by being more offensive.”Perhaps a more offensive-minded coach is the direction Verbeek goes. He conspicuously gave guarded answers on the qualities he wants for his next hire or what swayed him in the direction of firing Cronin. Cronin readily acknowledged that he came in with a direct, driving approach that demanded accountability. He pulled up on the reins in Year 2 and fed more of his messaging through his leadership group, which players seemed to better appreciate.“The NHL’s got great coaches,” Cronin told The Athletic before the Ducks’ home finale. “Everybody knows what needs to be done to win shifts, to win events. It’s the consistency of the messaging. And now in this generation, it’s how you deliver the message. It’s got to be more of a collaboration.”There will be options among the coaching ranks and Verbeek said he’s going to exhaust them all. Letting Cronin go, he insisted, wasn’t a matter of having someone to move quickly on. He didn’t give a timeline for when he wants a new coach in place. It could be a veteran who’s won and proven to take teams from a rebuilding stage to playoff contention. It could be a first-time NHL head coach like Cronin was.“You can look at rookie coaches that come in and do a bang-up job, so I’m not eliminating any options on the table,” Verbeek said. “It will be important to some of the questions I’m going to ask to see what their thoughts are, what their methods are going to be, their strategies, all of that sort of thing in the process of interviewing a coach.”In what he didn’t see take place with Cronin, Verbeek cryptically said it wasn’t about wins and losses but more in things that “could not be overcome,” to which he would not divulge or elaborate on. “Those are private conversations, and I want them to remain there,” he said.Like it or not, that’s his decision not to go into detail. Ultimately, he will be judged on the results of his moves. But the Ducks are at a pivotal point in their evolution where Verbeek should be held accountable for them. Or, if they work, roundly praised.(Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
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