Anaheim Ducks Fire Joel Bouchard

7:45 PM: The team has confirmed the departures of Bouchard, Talbot, and Jacob while also announcing that assistant coach Geoff Ward has left the team for personal reasons.  Ward just completed his first season with Anaheim after spending the previous three years in Calgary as both an assistant coach and later their head coach.

5:08 PM: While the new Anaheim Ducks front office has chosen to stick with the head coach of their NHL team, the same cannot be said of the coach of their AHL affiliate. According to RDS’s Eric Leblanc and TVA’s Renaud Lavoie, the Ducks have parted ways with San Diego Gulls head coach Joel Bouchard, as well as his assistants Max Talbot and Daniel Jacob.

The Gulls were not a great team this year. They did make the playoffs, but they bowed out in the first round, losing in two games to the Ontario Reign, and only managed a 28-33-7 record. So, looking at it from a wins and losses perspective, this move is not a surprising one. But looking at the overall picture of Joel Bouchard’s coaching career makes this move a bit more unexpected. Bouchard just last season was viewed as a name on the rise, and we even speculated that he may have joined the Ducks organization with the idea that he could see a promotion to being the Ducks head coach, if Eakins had been fired mid-season. But that possibility never materialized, as Eakins’ Ducks played well enough for him to retain his post, and Bouchard’s Gulls tenure never quite got off the ground.

Fortunately for Bouchard, though, the sterling resume that made him a promising coaching prospect just a year ago remains largely intact. He is still the coach that became one of the top bench bosses in the QMJHL, and his combined 160-80-32 record with the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada is proof of that. So while his tenure running the Gulls was not nearly as impressive, this news is unlikely to be a massive setback for a coach undoubtedly chasing one of the highly-coveted 32 NHL head coaching jobs.