The Ducks Traded Youth for Time, Then Troy Terry Stole It Back
Start with the number that reframes everything: 75. That is the percentage of Anaheim's right-wing production that Troy Terry accounted for last season, per the depth chart. Not a plurality. Not a plurality with a capable backup pressing him. Three-quarters of the position, on a roster that just traded away two of its most promising young players and is now watching its second-leading scorer recover from hip surgery. The Ducks didn't just lose a player this offseason. They discovered that the entire retooling calculus was built on a foundation that is now sitting in a surgical suite for five to six months.
The trades themselves are defensible in isolation. Moving Olen Zellweger and Mason McTavish for the 15th and 29th picks in the 2026 draft is the kind of move that makes sense when you believe your core is ready to accelerate and you need flexibility to build around it. McTavish posted 29 points in 46 games last season—real production, not filler—and Zellweger was one of the few young defensemen on the roster with a positive plus-minus. Shedding both in the same offseason isn't a minor trim. It's a structural decision, and it only works if the players you're keeping are healthy and the depth behind them is functional. Neither condition currently holds.
The defensive picture is where the numbers get genuinely alarming. Jackson LaCombe was extraordinary—34 points and 24.4 minutes of ice time per game in 49 appearances—but the production drop to Jacob Trouba behind him is not a gap, it's a cliff. And that was before Zellweger left. The late-season data made this fragility visible in real time: Mintyukov's ice time jumped 4.9 minutes per game over the final ten games of the season, a 30% workload surge that reflected desperation more than design. The Ducks were already asking a young defenseman to carry an emergency load. Now, with Zellweger gone and Mintyukov locked up on a five-year extension but still developing, the blue line is thinner than it was when it was already cracking under pressure. The team allowed 4.1 goals per game over those final ten games, up from 3.3 in the preceding twenty. That collapse, not early-season inconsistency, is what kept them out of the playoffs at 43-39.
The Leo Carlsson commitment is the correct call and I won't argue otherwise. Matching Philadelphia's five-year, $18 million AAV offer sheet is a franchise-defining move for a 21-year-old center who put up 48 points in 49 games. That's the kind of production rate you build around, and letting him walk to the Flyers would have been an organizational catastrophe. But here's what the Carlsson signing also does: it makes Terry's injury hurt more, not less. When you anchor your future to a center and commit that kind of cap real estate, you need the wings around him to be functional from opening night. Carlsson needs someone to play with. Right now, Beckett Sennecke—who posted 37 points but finished at minus-10—is the most likely candidate on the right side, and that is a significant step down from a 46-point, plus-8 Terry.
The one number that should genuinely worry Anaheim's front office isn't in the injury report. It's 24-12. The Ducks went 24-12 in one-goal games last season, a 67% win rate that dwarfed their 52% overall mark. That's a massive positive variance in close contests—the kind of number that tends to regress. A team that won a disproportionate share of tight games, lost its second-leading scorer to surgery, traded away two young players for draft picks, and still has a gaping defensive depth problem is not a team that can afford to count on running that one-goal game luck back. My read is that the 2026-27 Ducks are more likely to be a 38-to-40-win team than a 43-win team, unless Terry returns early and the defense gets meaningful outside reinforcement. The draft picks are real assets. They just don't play in October.