Whicker: Luke Hughes could help Ducks negotiate long road back

You might have missed the Ducks and Kings in the NHL playoffs, but they were there, just with different clothes.

Tyler Toffoli is still there with Montreal. He scored 28 goals this season. In the playoffs, he has five more, and 14 points. The Kings sent him to Vancouver for a package that included Tyler Madden, whom scouts like. Maybe he can even be Toffoli someday.

Erik Cernak is plus-12 on the blue line for Tampa Bay and has 10 points in 20 playoff games. He’s the defenseman the Kings gave the Lightning in that strange trade for goalie Ben Bishop.

Shea Theodore led Vegas with 22:33 of ice time this year and had an epic fake pass-and-shoot that highlighted a playoff victory over Montreal. A former first-round pick by the Ducks, he was the price they paid for making sure Vegas didn’t take Josh Manson in the expansion draft.

Alex Martinez was plus-26 for Vegas in the regular season and had four goals in the playoffs. The defenseman whose shots won the Western Conference finals and the Stanley Cup for the Kings in 2014 wound up in Sin Bin City after a shuffle of draft picks that essentially brought Lars Andersson to L.A.

William Karlson was plus-12 in the playoffs for the Knights and had 16 points in 19 games. Wild Bill was a Duck, but he went to Columbus in a trade deadline deal for James Wisniewski.

Corey Perry, the Ducks’ only Hart Trophy winner, has had four goals in the playoffs in his first season with the Canadiens. The Ducks bought him out and allowed him to chase championships, and he’s been in back-to-back Finals, with Dallas and Montreal. And guess what? He still controls the puck and pushes enemy buttons, to the point that he got slugged by Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy on Monday.

Kyle Palmieri produced seven goals for the Islanders in the postseason. The Ducks sent him to New Jersey for second- and third-round picks who dissipated, and Palmieri has never stopped making them regret it.

The playoffs once lived in southern California, quite comfortably. Now hockey season climaxes with the NHL draft, on July 23. That is when the Ducks and Kings, drafting third and eighth in the first round, try to buy the vowels that might unlock their puzzles.

With some exceptions, those “exes” in the playoffs are understandable casualties of the hard salary cap. But did the Ducks and Kings get enough, in terms of cap room or personnel, for the credible warriors they lost? Of course not, and if you could merely draft your way back to excellence, the Stanley Cup would be a citizen of Edmonton. In a six-year span beginning in 2010, the Oilers had four No. 1 overall picks.

The top teams draft, trade and develop, in no particular order. On Monday night the Lightning had Brayden Point, Nikita Kucherov, Alex Killorn, Anthony Cirelli, Ondrej Palat, Mathieu Joseph and Ross Colton in their lineup. They drafted all of them, but none in the first round, and Palat was a seventh-round pick.

The Kings have a raft of supremely talented kids and the Ducks have Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale, who looked seaworthy in their first NHL games.

In this murky draft, the Ducks should get a crack at defenseman Luke Hughes, center Mason McTavish or winger Dylan Guenther.

Luke knows all about Draft Day. Oldest brother Jack was the top overall pick, by New Jersey, in 2018, and Quinn was selected seventh overall by Vancouver the previous year. Luke is the biggest, at 6-foot-2. Like all the Hugheses, he knows hockey answers before he hears the questions. His dad Jim was a longtime coach in college and an NHL assistant, and formerly the player development director for the Maple Leafs.

“I’d say my three best attributes are hockey sense, skating and compete level,” Luke said Tuesday. “But the best part of my game is probably the exits and entries into the zones. I’m deceptive with the puck, and I can defend on the rush, the net front and the cycle. And I can play in all situations.”

Hughes says he’s “super excited” about his commitment to Michigan. Obviously, the Ducks need help yesterday, if not earlier. They cry for an up-front scorer like Guenther. But Hughes and Drysdale could give them an extraordinarily skilled left-right defense pair for many years. Whether the fans have that many years to invest isn’t so clear.

More likely, Seattle will burst into the NHL with the same approximate force Vegas used to make the Final in 2018 and the road for the Kings and Ducks will lengthen. When you start from nothing, there’s nothing to correct.