The Anaheim Ducks have announced that they have cut defenseman Brendan Mikkelson and forward Logan MacMillan. Mikkelson will report to Toronto of the AHL and MacMillan was assigned to Bakersfield of the ECHL.
These final two cuts bring the Ducks down to the NHL maximum 23-man roster required for the regular season. To see the complete roster for the regular season, click here.
The assignment of MacMillan is no surprise at all as Head Coach Randy Carlyle suggested that MacMillan was only with the team to gain exposure to the NHL. The assignment of Mikkelson, however, is a bit of a surprise considering he [...]

The Ducks are expected to make final roster decisions by noon Wednesday as that is the deadline mandated by the NHL. The team will have to make a minimum of two cuts, but might make more depending on how the coaching staff feels about the developmental needs of certain players.
I can only talk about the roster cuts so many times, so I’ll just refer you to my posts here and here. Not much has changed since then except for the fact that Erik Christensen might be temporarily sent down while he can get some more game-time under his belt before rejoining the [...]

No big Ducks news here…I just wanted to point out that several Ducks players have made appearances at restaurants in the last week. Ryan Getzlaf was at a Red Robin in Rancho Cucamonga as you can read here, while Scott Niedermayer, James Wisniewski, Saku Koivu, and Mike Brown were at RA Sushi as you can read here.

The Ducks were finally picked to finish first in the Western Conference by a professional hockey writer. ESPN has done team previews for all the NHL teams and Pierre LeBrun picked the Ducks to finish first mostly because of a sense of anger over losing to Detroit in last years playoffs.
Pierre LeBrun is not the best hockey writer there is, in my opinion. First of all he comes from ESPN, which doesn’t carry hockey and has very little staff that knows anything about the sport at all. Second, he suffers from the East-coast bias (also my opinion, as someone in [...]

Today has been eerily quiet for Ducks fans. On a day when most teams sent down the last of their prospects in order to finalize their rosters, the Ducks have done absolutely nothing. The Ducks will have until Wednesday afternoon to make final decisions on their regular season roster.
The consensus, at least between sports writers, is that Brendan Mikkelson will make the team as a sixth or seventh defenseman. Although he did not have a strong performance against the Kings on Sunday night, he played well in all the previous games. It seems as though last year’s exposure to the [...]

For those that were not able to be at the game last night game versus the Kings, click here to see highlights.

A very entertaining game ended with a Ducks victory to give the team a preseason record of 5-3, while the Kings played well but dropped to a record of 4-3-1. Both teams’ top lines were the showcase of the game as Bobby Ryan, Ryan Getzlaf, and Corey Perry collected a total of seven points and accounted for four of the teams five goals, while Ryan Smyth, Anze Kopitar, and Trevor Lewis collected a total of eight points and accounted for all of the Kings’ goals.
The game got off to a quick start with a Ducks goal just two minutes into the game. [...]

The Ducks will take on the Kings tonight at Honda Center in the final preseason game for both clubs. The Kings played last night to a 5-3 victory over the Colorado Avalanche and have an impressive 4-2-1 record during the preseason. The Ducks, meanwhile, are 4-3 in an up-and-down preseason where the latest game was a significant “down” with a 6-0 loss to the Sharks on Friday night.
The Ducks roster is almost completely set as I wrote about here and we will have an NHL lineup tonight. The Kings also have only a few more cuts to make, so tonight’s roster will be very close [...]