Ducks Worth Smiling About

Craig Hartsburg is tanned. He smiles. A quiet vacation on Hawaii’s Big Island, spent with his wife Peg, a bottle of suntan lotion and a plan to stay away from the phone and not much else, will do that for a man.

Hartsburg leans back in his chair in his office in the basement of the Pond and talks about the NHL playoffs. He wonders what will be the future of Philadelphia’s Eric Lindros. He comments on how well the New Jersey Devils are playing and how rough he expects a series between Colorado and Dallas to become.

His own team, the Mighty Ducks, isn’t participating in the playoffs. For this Hartsburg is genuinely sorry but not at all discouraged. A month after Anaheim’s season has ended, Hartsburg can lean back in his chair and say that he would be perfectly capable of coaching this same Ducks team to the playoffs next year. If not a single move is made, Hartsburg says, the Ducks will be better next year. Honestly. Hartsburg believes this.

Why?

“Because they will be older,” Hartsburg says. “Because they grew up this year.”

Hartsburg does not try to make it seem like the Ducks did OK this season. It was not OK to miss the playoffs. It is never OK. “That shouldn’t have happened,” Hartsburg says. “But it did happen and what’s the point of going back over it?”

In quick order Hartsburg lists his Duck to-do list.

“Penalty killing, we’ve got to get better,” Hartsburg says. “Anytime you’re the worst in the league in something it’s not hard to figure out that it needs improving.”

And then Hartsburg moves on to the power play. “We were better the second half of the year,” Hartsburg says, “but we’ve got to find a way to execute the power play the way we did the last 30 games of this season over a full season next year.”

And then Hartsburg would like to “see us play harder physically in front of both nets. If you can do that,” Hartsburg says, “that’s how you win in this league. And I’d like our young forwards to get bigger and stronger.”

Hartsburg would like a lot of things. He’d like to be coaching his team right now. He’d like to see his stars, Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne, showcasing themselves on playoff TV. He snorts, rolls his eyes and says he cannot believe that suggestions were made this season that the Ducks should trade either Kariya or Selanne. “Why would we want to do that?” Hartsburg says. “Two of the best players in the league with great work ethics and great character who are great for the community.”

Most of all Hartsburg would like back a stretch of 14 games beginning on Dec. 27 when the Ducks lost at Edmonton, 4-1, and ending on Jan. 26 when the Ducks lost at home to the miserable New York Islanders, 4-2. The Ducks went 2-2-10 in that post-holiday disastrous period. It was a time when his team beat St. Louis, the St. Louis team which finished with the best record in the Western Conference, and defending Stanley Cup champion Dallas, and then lost to the Islanders, and to Buffalo and Florida at home. “We dug ourselves too deep a hole then,” Hartsburg says. “We couldn’t make that up.”

As Hartsburg talks of that stretch, he struggles. His team, which he describes often as “young,” struggled to hold leads, he says. His team, his young team, gave away too many points by losing games in the third period instead of in overtime. What Hartsburg means, he says, is that the Ducks would go into a third period tied and not get to overtime. If only they’d gotten to overtime, he says, then even if they’d lost they still would have gotten a point. Inexcusable, Hartsburg says.

Hartsburg even blames the weather. Don’t laugh.

So many of these Ducks come from places where winter is brutal, where it is cold and dank, gray and dismal, where the inside of a hockey rink is the nicest place in the world. In Southern California, Hartsburg says, “in January and February it’s so nice out. This is just a great place to live. Players can get distracted. When we went through that tough stretch, it was pretty nice out.”

Hey, the lackadaisical support that Southern California fans offer their teams has been blamed on the Living-Is-Too-Good-To-Care premise. Hartsburg might have something.

So short of importing sleet, snow and a sun that disappears from New Year’s until Groundhog Day, what’s a coach to do?

“I think experience is the key,” Hartsburg says. “It hurt to lose and I don’t think there was a player in our locker room who was ready for this season to end and I don’t think there’s one who doesn’t wish training camp was starting tomorrow.”

Hartsburg also wishes camp were starting tomorrow. He dismisses rumblings on radio call-in shows and Internet chat groups that his job is in danger. “Until somebody says something to my face, I will not talk about that,” Hartsburg says. He does not think the 1999-2000 season was a failure. “We did not get worse,” Hartsburg says, “we just did not get better. And in our division you’d better get better.”

So next season Hartsburg will expect the Ducks to get better. Better squared, better enough to make up for last season and then better again for next season.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com

* FLYERS IN FINAL 4

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