The Ducks have had a head coaching vacancy since the start of the offseason when it was revealed that Dallas Eakins wouldn’t be back after spending four years with the team.
GM Pat Verbeek is known to be casting a wide net as he looks to make his first NHL head coaching hire but there haven’t been many names connected to them thus far.
However, Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli reports (Twitter link) that Devils associate coach Andrew Brunette, Maple Leafs assistant Spencer Carbery, and Penguins assistant Mike Vellucci are under consideration for the spot.
Brunette is the only one of the three with head coach experience at the NHL level after being at the helm of the Panthers for most of the 2021-22 campaign. However, he wasn’t offered the full-time role (which instead went to Paul Maurice) and eventually landed on Lindy Ruff’s bench.
It would have been understandable to think that Brunette was added with an eye on replacing Ruff but with the veteran working on an extension to stay with New Jersey, it’s possible that Brunette could be on the move.
It would be a different situation for Brunette moving from a playoff team to one that’s squarely in a rebuild but the teams he has been with the last couple of years being strong ones offensively, that could be particularly appealing on a team with a lot of young talent up front.
Carbery has been viewed as a coach on the rise in recent years and after spending three years running the bench with AHL Hershey, he joined Toronto as an assistant in 2021. He has played an important role in coaching their power play, a group that has had considerable success lately, producing at a 26% clip this season, a small tick down from the 27.3% from the year before.
Carbery is also known to be under consideration for the head coaching vacancy in Washington and if Toronto decides to make a change behind the bench following their exit against Florida, he’ll quite likely have a chance to get that role as well.
As for Vellucci, he has experience both behind the bench and in the front office having worked in various roles with Carolina for several years before spending a season as coach and GM with AHL Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in 2019-20 before joining Mike Sullivan’s staff as an assistant in 2020.
Vellucci also has a long history at the major junior level, spending more than a decade as the coach and GM with OHL Plymouth. With the Ducks transitioning to a younger group, someone with plenty of experience coaching younger players could certainly be beneficial to Anaheim.
When Verbeek announced that Eakins wouldn’t be returning, he wouldn’t commit to any sort of timeline for when he’d hire his replacement but indicated he hoped he’d have his new bench boss in place by the draft.
Considering the draft ends just two days before free agency opens up, it would make a lot of sense to have Eakins’ replacement in place before that time so Verbeek has roughly six more weeks to find Anaheim’s next head coach.
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