ON THE Right Track

Practice is history. Players begin to drift off, toward home or lunch or the links.

Mighty Duck Coach Ron Wilson comes padding out of his office. White athletic socks. Green- and eggplant-colored sweats. Hair cropped close.

Sure, he’s got a minute. What’s up?

Thirty minutes roll by and he’s still going strong. It’s not the first time and probably not the last. If there’s something Wilson does better than coaching a good game, it’s talking a good game.

He starts slowly, perhaps unsure where the conversation is headed. He’s wary, cagey, short with his answers.

In time, he begins to open up. It’s getting tougher to drop in the next question. Just now he’s adopted a serious tone. In a moment, he will switch gears and begin laughing.

“Players deserve all the credit,” he’s saying. “It’s a player’s game.”

He’s got that right. NHL coaches seem to come and go so fast it’s difficult to keep track. Few last longer than a few seasons with the same team.

Saturday, Wilson begins his fourth season as the coach of the Ducks. He and Detroit’s Scotty Bowman are tied for second for the longest current tenure with the same club. Only Terry Crisp, who has coached Tampa Bay five seasons, has been on the job longer.

It hasn’t been easy, but Wilson has persevered through the rough patches, dodged the barbs, laughed at the jokes, cried at the mistakes and emerged with his sanity intact.

“When I first took this job, I worried about what people had told me,” said Wilson, whose record with the Ducks is 84-112-18. “They had said, ‘This could be your last job.’ ”

The Ducks haven’t exactly taken the league by storm. Their fellow expansion entrants in 1993, the Florida Panthers, did that by reaching the Stanley Cup finals last season.

The Ducks have yet to post a winning season.

They have yet to reach the postseason.

Until trading for Teemu Selanne last Feb. 7, they had yet to show they were more serious about winning hockey games than selling T-shirts and caps and cups and license-plate frames.

However, Wilson is convinced, now more than ever, that he’s doing things the right way. More and more, management and players seem to agree with him. That’s not to say Wilson is satisfied. It’s simply that he realizes his system works.

Given the right players in the right setting, Wilson showed how well it works by leading the United States to the World Cup of Hockey championship in September.

OK, so that was Brett Hull not Bob Corkum squeezing off shots and making spectacular plays seem routine.

But Wilson said he did nothing different in coaching Team USA.

He demanded maximum attention and effort while the players were on the ice--be it practice or game. He took the players to baseball games and to golf outings in an effort to get them to bond. He told jokes.

And he earned praise.

“He gave us a pretty simple system to adapt to,” said Hull, who plays for the St. Louis Blues. “His attitude was all business on the ice. When we’re out of the [hockey] gear, he said, ‘Let’s have fun. Let’s be a group of guys striving for one goal.’ ”

Said Chicago’s Tony Amonte: “He was always upbeat. He never had a bad word to say. Even when we were down, 2-1, at the end of the third and deciding game against Canada, he still believed we could win it.

“And because he did, everyone else did.”

Bob McKenzie, writing in the Hockey News, put it this way: “Wilson pushed all the right buttons.”

The U.S. victory sent a dagger into the heart of a nation and Wilson seemed at once smug, proud and a bit cranky at reliving it all with Southland reporters on the day after.

Clearly, the victory over Canada was his finest hour, making him a front-runner to coach the 1998 U.S. Olympic team.

But he also had to work quickly to whip the Ducks into shape. This, he had already acknowledged, was not going to be as easy as coaching the very best U.S. hockey players.

*

Hockey is life.

Wilson’s father, Larry, played and coached for the Detroit Red Wings. His uncle, Johnny, played 13 seasons in the NHL and later was a coach.

Ron grew up on rinks and in dressing rooms. He knew Gordie Howe. All the Red Wings, in fact. But the Toronto Maple Leafs were really his team.

He was born in Windsor, Canada, across the border from Detroit.

He played at Providence for Lou Lamoriello, now the New Jersey Devils’ general manager.

He played on U.S. national teams for the late Bob Johnson.

He spent three seasons with his beloved Maple Leafs and four with the Minnesota North Stars.

He was 38 when he applied for the job as the coach of the expansion Ducks in 1993. Three seasons as Pat Quinn’s assistant at Vancouver and one season as an assistant in the International Hockey League didn’t measure up to the experience of others.

But Wilson wowed General Manager Jack Ferreira with a strong interview and landed the job.

The first season in Anaheim really could have been Wilson’s last as an NHL coach. Plenty of others had tried the expansion game and failed miserably. But Wilson installed a simple system and the first team bought into it.

The Ducks won 33 games that first season. They won 16 in the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season.

And then came the great tumble.

The Ducks got off to a 2-8 start last season. Expectations heightened with standout winger Paul Kariya in his second season, but performances (with the exception of Kariya) did not match.

In December, the Ducks won a total of three games. Injuries mounted. Players such as Corkum, who had been so sound the first two seasons, turned in poor performances.

The sniping in the dressing room--directed at Wilson and at players--grew louder by the day.

Wilson seemed to be on the verge of snapping. He lashed out at goaltender Guy Hebert, singling him out for criticism in the newspapers. He grew more grumpy with each passing day.

Things turned around, though. Injured players returned. Trades were made. And when Selanne arrived, the Ducks mounted a late-season charge that fell one point short of a playoff berth.

At season’s end, only a handful of teams were playing as well as the Ducks. Kariya became the first Duck to score 50 goals in a season. Selanne had 16 goals and 36 points in 28 games for the Ducks.

The team won a franchise-best 35 games.

*

Only Wilson and a few others knew that Tony Tavares, Duck president, had been ready to fire him at midseason.

Privately, Tavares hasn’t always been a Wilson backer over the course of the Ducks’ first three seasons. But if Tavares’ recent comments are any indication, he has changed his mind. Winning, of course, has a tendency to mend fences.

“I like his impatience,” Tavares said. “That’s good. He challenges the players. He’s opinionated. He’s a rock-solid coach. He’s exceptionally bright.”

Pressed about possibly making a coaching change last season, Tavares sought to clarify the story.

“Frankly, people made more out of the situation,” he said. “We had a disgusting December performance. We had a ton of injuries. The only thing I got on Ron about was being too vocal in the papers. He was getting on specific guys. . . . I didn’t like him mentioning individual performances.

“I never had any problem with his coaching ability. Certainly, I understood his frustration. Ron was learning too.”

Wilson now says perhaps he was a bit too harsh on Hebert. Airing his complaints publicly was probably wrong.

“I’ve always had a good relationship with Guy,” Wilson said. “I was trying to think of ways of getting him to play better. I went a little more public with it. Maybe it was a mistake, but it finally got his attention.

“It was never personal.”

Hebert is quick to dismiss the heat Wilson gave him last season.

“He’s just like a player,” said Hebert, picked by Wilson to be Mike Richter’s backup on Team USA at the World Cup.

“Everybody gets better in their job as time goes on. Ron came here as a rookie coach. Obviously, he’s learned a lot. He made some mistakes, but he guessed right on some things too.”

Not everyone is as forgiving. Oleg Tverdovsky and Chad Kilger, the players traded to Winnipeg for Selanne, were particularly critical of Wilson. They said he had a tough time dealing with their youthful mistakes, which made for a difficult playing environment.

“It comes with the territory,” Wilson said. “Not many of the guys who left here sniping have gone on to do anything anywhere else.”

Wilson softened as he continued.

“I’m a gardener,” he explained. “I have to weed the garden. Sometimes there’s a weed in there and it’s OK. Then there’s that chemistry thing and you have to pull that weed out, and it’s going to go screaming.

“I’m sort of like the light. If I’m a good light, the players will grow toward me.

“My job is to come up with the right crop.”