Mighty Ducks Look to Future With Playoffs in Mind : Hockey: Last-place Anaheim quickly puts second season behind it and contemplates building by trades and draft.

The Mighty Ducks waddled in Year 2. Next year, can they fly?

They were talking about the playoffs as the season ended Wednesday--the 1996 playoffs.

The San Jose Sharks have set the standard by reaching the postseason in their third and fourth seasons, and the Ducks are aiming to play .500 hockey and make the playoffs in their third as well.

The Ducks’ young team faltered early this year, but they were a .500 team for nearly six weeks during the second half of their second season after a flurry of trades improved the defense. They fell a few victories short of making the playoffs, and if they wanted, they could spend their summer obsessing over the plays that turned near victories against the Kings into ties or a near tie against Detroit into a loss. But as Coach Ron Wilson said, “You can’t live life that way.”

Instead, they’re moving on. Better to spend the summer thinking about the draft and trades and finding a big skilled forward to improve the NHL’s worst power play the last two seasons than thinking about what might have been. General Manager Jack Ferreira sat watching practice this week with a folded piece of scratch paper in his hand. “My team for next year,” he said.

The Ducks finished their second season Wednesday last in the Western Conference with 37 points, nine points behind the Florida Panthers, who joined the league at the same time. But they grade out higher than the Panthers in terms of getting talented youngsters into the lineup.

The Ducks’ second season was one in which they said goodby to Terry Yake, Stu Grimson, Anatoli Semenov and Tim Sweeney but hello to Paul Kariya, Oleg Tverdovsky, Todd Krygier, Steve Rucchin, Mike Sillinger, Dave Karpa, Milos Holan, Valeri Karpov and Jason York.

“It’s my personal opinion that we’re still one or two players away from being in the playoffs,” center Bob Corkum said after the Ducks beat Toronto, 6-1, in the season finale. “Hopefully we’ll get them through the draft or a trade.”

Kariya, 20, led the team with 18 goals and 39 points, and as of Thursday his name has changed. It’s no longer “Rookie Paul Kariya,” just Paul Kariya.

“I never really thought of myself as a rookie, just a player,” he said. “I guess it will be nice just to be thought of as a player.”

He is an extraordinarily talented one, but joining the NHL required adjusting his game.

“I’m a better player now than at the start of the year,” he said. “It wasn’t only what I can and can’t do at this level, it’s what I can do with this team. The last couple of games I finally got it. I went from being a total playmaker to trying to shoot all the time and now to a mix. You have to constantly adjust. Even at the end of your career, you’ll be adjusting.

“For the team and myself personally, we improved as the year has gone on. I think definitely if we had this team at the start of the year we could have made the playoffs.”

Wilson, who called Kariya’s first season “a great learning experience,” was sometimes frustrated by Kariya’s inattention to defense. “He’s had good moments and bad moments,” Wilson said. “That’s to be expected from a 20-year-old player. He’s got to learn the way he has to play at this level.”

If there was a disappointing aspect to Kariya’s first season, it was his plus-minus rating (even-strength and short-handed goals, for and against, while he’s on the ice) of minus-17.

“The defensive aspect is something I’ve always had to work on,” Kariya said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plus-minus before this year. But it’s one of those stats, if you’re an offensive player and you get a plus you’re almost always in the play. At the same time, if you get a minus, sometimes it’s not directly your fault. It’s just one of those stats, you like it if you’re a plus and you don’t like it if you’re a minus.

“At this level, with players like Pavel Bure or Teemu Selanne, it helps to get back. You have to learn when and where you can take chances.”

The way Wilson sees it, sometimes only experience can teach a lesson.

“Paul and Oleg are very stubborn. That’s part of what makes them so good, they believe in themselves,” he said. “You need that to play at this level. But they’ve had their fingers burnt a number of times. They stick their fingers on the stove, not believing it’s hot when you say it’s hot. It’s trial by fire. No matter how smart you think you are, you have to experience it first hand.”

All the attention on the rookies somewhat obscured the disappointing seasons of Corkum, Garry Valk and Joe Sacco, three players who had career seasons last year.

Corkum came into camp out of shape after the lockout--though he disagrees with management’s guess that it was because of his activity as the player representative to the union. Valk suffered a knee injury that cost him the first 10 games of the season, and Sacco broke his left thumb, missing seven games.

Corkum and Sacco finished with 10 goals, and Valk with only three. Valk and Sacco, along with Stephan Lebeau and Todd Ewen, have played out their contracts, in part because of the unusual circumstances created by the owners’ lockout, and all four will be seeking new deals this summer. They can become restricted free agents, but the Ducks would have the right to match any offers and keep them.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Sacco said. “I want to stay here; I want to be part of this team. I think everyone would like to stay.

“The team is headed in the right direction. We have good young players. This team has a good future and you want to be a part of it.”

Wilson, who scratched Valk in the final game of the season in what he called a “warning shot over the bow for the summer,” has openly questioned whether some players can bounce back.

“You have to wonder, did some people have one good year? You see that a lot in people’s hockey careers,” he said. “They have one good year and ride that through the rest of their career.

“You can’t be confident if you’re a second- or third-line guy in this league, thinking, I’ll be on the team. That’s where you get into trouble. We need guys to rebound. We can’t just rely on our young players. You need your core players to be consistent.

“They have to be ready from Day 1 (next fall) or they’ll be behind the 8 ball from Day 1, and then their careers will be behind the 8 ball.

“There’ll still be changes. I don’t know if enough people realize that.”