Joel Quenneville on Hall of Famer Duncan Keith: “He Did it All”

Anaheim Ducks head coach Joel Quenneville is not the least bit surprised that his former player and three-time Stanley Cup champion with the Chicago Blackhawks, Duncan Keith, will give his Hockey Hall of Fame speech on Monday night.

Quenneville and Keith were a part of arguably the greatest dynasty of the salary cap era. The former Blackhawks head coach is in the midst of a great start to his NHL head coach return with the Ducks, but he had no problem going down memory lane with R.org when it came to Duncan Keith.

“Well, I first saw Duncan, really, when I got to go to Chicago and coach,” Quenneville told R.org recently.

“He was young. I probably played against him a few games, coaching other teams, and you don’t know much about him, but they had a good group of really young players with a really, really heavy group of talented kids. ‘Dunk’ was with that group at a young age. He was very competitive and had great instincts for the game. He had a love of the game, and was just a real passionate guy and a great teammate.”

All of that, though, didn’t prepare Quenneville for the champion and hall-of-fame player he was now coaching.

“How good would I think he was going to be?” Quenneville asked rhetorically.

“I would’ve never thought that he would’ve blossomed out to be a Norris Trophy winner, Conn Smythe winner, and three-time Stanley Cup winner. He did it all. And I don’t know if I thought when I first saw him play that he was going to be that guy, but just to watch him grow and just appreciate the game was so much fun.

And then just grabbing more ice time and more critical situations, thriving with it. So it was. …Boy! He worked at it. And you got to admit, not a big defenseman, but wasn’t influenced by heaviness, wasn’t influenced by the competition, did his thing. And did he ever do it, eh?”

Setting The Standard

Every NHL coach will tell you that the best teams they coached practiced harder than they played in games, and that was Duncan Keith to Quenneville.

“Yeah, he treated every practice like a game and I loved that,” Quenneville said.

“His standard was that he wanted to be the best he could be, and he always pushed himself to that level. It didn’t bother him when it wasn’t happening, and he’d find a way to make it happen. And so he overcame a lot, but he had high standards, high expectations, and loved to be out there when it mattered most. His standards were so far above the rest,”

With those high standards came plenty of peculiarities and unique routines.

“Yeah, he was unique, that’s for sure,” Quenneville said.

“Everybody loved dunks. Dunks was dunks, had his own way about him. It would take him three hours to eat his lunch or breakfast, and very meticulous and went about it like that. But he was just a real hockey nut.”

The three-time Stanley Cup-winning head coach and his now Hall of Fame player still keep in touch, and Quenneville treasures every encounter.

“We still keep in touch, and I always like to hear how he’s doing, and he is working with his kids to teach them the game,” Quenneville said. “So this honor is very deserving. It’s a great honor. I’m happy for him. I’m so proud I had the privilege to coach him.”