ANAHEIM The Ducks were a half-hour into practice, and Randy Carlyle was not happy.

When the Anaheim coach is unhappy, he tends not to keep it to himself.

In this case, two days before the Ducks opened their second-round playoff series with Vancouver, Carlyle stopped a drill to tell his players they were not working hard enough. He did this with sufficient volume as well as a number of words not fit for a church social to get the message across to his players, onlookers in the Honda Center, and some drivers on the nearby 57 Freeway.

"They may look at you like you've got 10 heads if you start screaming and yelling at them three days before the playoffs," Carlyle said later, "but if I feel I'm not getting the necessary focus, I'll do it."

And did he get that focus?

"After I screamed and yelled, yes," he said.

This, in a nutshell, this is Randy Carlyle.

"Jovial" and "low-key" are among the terms least appropriate to describe the 50-year-old native of Sudbury, Ontario, in his second season as Ducks coach after a 17-year NHL playing career and nine as an NHL assistant or minor league head coach. His tough, no-nonsense style mirrors general manager, Brian Burke, who can make the word "hello" intimidating.

"They both will tell you what they're thinking at any time," says forward Ryan Getzlaf. "And you can tell them back. If push comes to shove and you need to say something, you can say it. He may not like it, or he may not listen to you, but you can say it anyway."

Burke is mystified his coach received little consideration for the Jack Adams Award for NHL coach of the year Carlyle is not among the three finalists but is very satisfied with Carlyle's style, and results.

"I wanted a coach like Marc Crawford, who's intense," said Burke.

Crawford, now coaching the Kings, was behind the bench when Burke was GM in Vancouver. "Randy's done a terrific job, just tremendous."

Intensity, it seems, pays dividends. Under Carlyle, the Ducks are 91-47-26 and have won five of six playoff series, surpassing the number of series won in the franchise's previous 11 seasons.

"He's able to push," said defenseman Chris Pronger. "Obviously, he's got a game plan in place that he wants us to play in a certain way, and play with an edge and all the rest of that."

The Ducks didn't take to that style immediately. In late November last season, they were below .500; six weeks later, they were still languishing eight points out of a playoff spot.

"It took us the better part of three months to really get our team playing well," Carlyle recalled. "We made some changes, there were some personnel changes, and then our team seemed to have taken on a new face about Dec. 1. We were a different hockey club from that point on."

The Ducks went 24-11-5 down the stretch, then had the second best record in the Western Conference this year. Carlyle may be demanding, but his team was capable of meeting those demands. With that established, everyone seemed to get a bit more comfortable.

"A coach has got to be pretty confident on the ice," said Getzlaf, "to know which guys he's got to put out, and line matchups and things like that. He's coaching pretty confident right now."

The player who's known Carlyle the longest is forward Teemu Selanne, whose rookie season with Winnipeg was Carlyle's last year with the Jets and as an NHL player.

"He hasn't changed," Selanne said. " He's a hard-nosed, honest guy. There's no secrets with him. He tells the truth, if it hurts or not. You can argue with that, but it's not worth it."

Given that Selanne is as upbeat as Carlyle is dour, it's no surprise that Carlyle the player tended to be a bit hard on the rookie Selanne.

"Oh, yeah, every day," Selanne said, laughing, "every day. He was just hard-nosed, like obviously expecting rookies to do extra stuff. It's normal. Somebody has to do it. That's how it goes.

"As a person, he's just the same guy. When you do what he wants, you don't have any problems."

When you don't do what he wants, of course, you're going to hear about it. Loudly.

If Carlyle were nothing more than intense and demanding, there would be good reason to wonder about his coaching shelf life. But he's a bit more complex than that. He's capable of doing the unconventional, as illustrated by "team-building" exercises that have included practice on a frozen canal in Ottawa, group bike rides and team horse-racing outings.

And he's introspective enough to know that he needs to keep learning and changing.

"You can never, ever sit back and say that you feel comfortable," he said, "that you know everything. There's so much more to learn, there's so much more experience to go through."

As an example, he cited the wild finish of Game 6 with Detroit, when the Ducks led 4-1, but barely held on to win 4-3.

"I hadn't been through that type of stress or situation," he said. "But what do you take from that? How could I have changed it? What are you going to do the next time? Should I have utilized the timeout earlier? All those things. You're always going to question yourself. And I think that's important, that you continue to learn."

So there's much more to Carlyle than that hard-nosed, high-volume persona though that, clearly, remains the face he usually shows to his team, and the world.

Contact Star columnist David Lassen at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.