The Ducks Are Already Playing Short-Handed, and the Season Hasn't Started
Troy Terry's right wing was never just a scoring slot. It was the connective tissue of Anaheim's offense — the player who found Carlsson in space, who kept possessions alive, who finished last season with 33 assists and 46 points in 48 games as the team's most prolific creator. Now that slot sits empty until at least November, maybe December, while Terry works through a five-to-six-month recovery from hip impingement and labral tear surgery performed in mid-June. The Ducks didn't lose a piece of their offense. They lost the piece that made the other pieces work.
The timing compounds everything. This was already a franchise in the middle of a deliberate, uncomfortable reset. Management traded Mason McTavish to St. Louis in late June for two draft picks, accepting a short-term scoring hole in exchange for long-term flexibility. That decision made sense in isolation — McTavish's 29 points in 46 games didn't justify blocking a prospect pipeline. But trade one forward and lose another to surgery, and you're no longer managing a transition; you're managing a crisis. The Ducks enter 2026-27 with two significant forward contributors gone from last year's lineup and no obvious replacement for either role.
What makes this particularly dangerous is what last season actually taught us about this team. Anaheim went 24-12 in one-goal games, a 67% win rate that looked like clutch character and was almost certainly variance. The underlying structure was fragile: the offense fell apart in the final stretch, scoring three goals a game instead of three and a half, while the defense allowed 4.1 goals per game compared to 3.3 in the prior 20. The team finished 43-39 and missed the playoffs not because of bad luck but because the margin for error was always thinner than the record suggested. Terry's playmaking was part of what kept that margin from being exposed sooner. Without him, there is no margin at all.
The narrow path to a competitive 2026-27 runs through a specific sequence. Leo Carlsson, operating at $18 million AAV on his new deal, has to take a genuine leap — not just in points but in the kind of game-shaping dominance that justifies being the second-highest-paid player in the league. Cutter Gauthier, who converted just over five percent of his shot attempts in the season's final ten games, has to rediscover the finishing efficiency that made him a top-line piece earlier in the year. And Beckett Sennecke, who produced 37 points in 51 games last season, has to step into a top-six role he hasn't fully inhabited yet. That is the offensive core Anaheim is betting on while Terry rehabilitates. It is young, it is talented, and it has not yet proven it can carry a team through a full season.
Management has moved to fill the gaps around the edges. Nikita Klepov, the OHL's leading scorer, signed his entry-level contract and will push for a roster spot. Sean Farrell arrived from the AHL via a trade with Montreal, adding a creative playmaker to the organizational depth. AJ Greer signed a four-year deal at $4.25 million AAV, bringing Stanley Cup experience to a room that needs steadying. These are reasonable additions. None of them replace what Terry does. My read is that the Ducks are hoping the sum of these parts — Klepov's upside, Farrell's playmaking, Greer's presence — can approximate one competent second-line contributor. That's a lot to ask of a collection of depth pieces, and it assumes the youth develops on schedule, which youth rarely does.
The path breaks if Terry's recovery runs long or if he comes back diminished. Hip labral repairs are notoriously unpredictable; players who return in month five sometimes take another three months to feel like themselves again. It also breaks if Gauthier's late-season finishing drought was a warning rather than an anomaly, and if Carlsson hasn't yet developed the kind of consistent dominance his contract demands. The Ducks have committed their future to the right player. But futures are built in the present, and the present is a roster with a structural scoring hole, a defensive depth chart that is thinner than any playoff team can afford, and a franchise player who now has to do more than he has ever been asked to