The Ducks Have One Star, One Injured Wing, and a Defense That Already Broke Once
Start with the number that reframes everything: 4.1. That is how many goals per game Anaheim surrendered over their final ten games last season — up from 3.3 in the prior twenty, a 0.8-goal-per-game deterioration that wasn't a slump so much as a structural failure arriving on schedule. The Ducks didn't lose the playoff race in a dramatic final week. They lost it because the defense that had been masking its own thinness all season finally stopped pretending. Everything the front office has done this summer needs to be understood against that backdrop, because the moves they've made don't fix the thing that actually broke.
The Carlsson commitment is real and it is right. Matching Philadelphia's five-year, $18 million AAV offer sheet on a 21-year-old center who posted 48 points in 49 games is the kind of decision franchises get one chance to make correctly. I wrote earlier this week that Anaheim paid $18 million for a foundation — I stand by that. But a foundation requires walls, and the offseason has been quietly demolishing them. Olen Zellweger and Mason McTavish are gone, traded to Buffalo and St. Louis respectively for the 15th and 29th overall picks. That's 29 points and a positive plus-minus walking out the door on the forward side, and on the blue line, it's the departure of the team's most promising young puck-mover. The picks may eventually matter. They do not play defense in October.
The number that should be keeping Anaheim's coaching staff up at night is not the cap figure on Carlsson's deal — it's the 4% production share that Jacob Trouba represents at the second defensive slot. Jackson LaCombe anchored the blue line at 34 points and 24.4 minutes per game last season, a genuine workhorse. The drop to Trouba is not a step down; it is a cliff. Per the depth analysis, Trouba's production registered at roughly 11% of the league-median starter figure — meaning the second chair on Anaheim's defense is functionally empty in terms of offensive contribution. That was already the case when the season ended. The Zellweger trade didn't create the problem, but it removed the most credible internal candidate to eventually solve it.
Then there is Troy Terry, and this is where the margin-for-error argument becomes almost arithmetically uncomfortable. Terry's 46 points and 33 assists made him the team's leading playmaker last season. His hip surgery — a labral repair following impingement — carries a five-to-six-month recovery window, which means the Ducks open 2026-27 without the player who accounted for 75% of their right-wing production, as I noted in my piece earlier this week. Beckett Sennecke is the next name on that depth chart, and he contributed 37 points last season while posting a minus-10. He can grow into a larger role. The question is whether he can do it fast enough to compensate for a gap that size, on a team that already needs to replace McTavish's center-ice minutes and shore up a defense that allowed 4.1 goals a night when the pressure was highest.
The one statistical lifeline Anaheim can point to is Cutter Gauthier's late-season collapse being, in all likelihood, variance rather than decline. He converted just 5.3% of his shots over the final ten games — 2 goals on 38 attempts — at a rate so far below sustainable norms that regression toward his earlier output is the reasonable expectation. A full-strength Gauthier, healthy and finishing at something approaching his first-half rate, is a genuine top-line wing. The Ducks need him to be exactly that, because the cushion that existed last season — the 24-12 record in one-goal games, the clutch-variance windfall I've been flagging since the season ended — is not a structural asset. It was luck, and luck does not re-sign.
My read is this: the Carlsson extension is the correct move, Mintyukov's five-year commitment provides genuine long-term stability, and the AJ Greer signing adds real depth at a reasonable cost. None of that is wrong. But the Ducks are entering 2026-27