Anaheim’s summer has gone from promising to messy in a hurry, and the Ducks are now staring at a roster that looks shakier than it did when last season ended.
The club came out of the year feeling good after climbing from non-playoff status to a second-round exit, and GM Pat Verbeek said around mid-May that Anaheim would keep building around its young core while adding complementary veterans. Since then, the Ducks have spent the offseason shuffling pieces around, and the results have not been pretty. They’ve lost the entire right side of their defensive core, dealt with offer sheets - and the threat of them - twice, and now have a fresh headache with forward Cutter Gauthier’s next extension.
The first blow was Troy Terry’s hip impingement surgery, which will keep him out for the first few months of the regular season. For Anaheim, that’s a real hit to the offense, even if the timing is better than having him go under the knife during the season or right at the start of it. Terry, 28, is a major part of what the Ducks do with the puck, and his absence will be felt early.
The roster movement started quietly enough. Anaheim traded the rights to pending UFAs John Carlson and Radko Gudas, and in the Gudas deal the Ducks brought in A.J.
Greer before signing him to a four-year contract worth $4.25MM per season. That’s a swingy bet for a player who has only one career season above 30 points, and that came this past year when he shot 16.3%, nearly twice his career average.
Greer may still be developing, but at 29, it’s fair to wonder how much more there is to uncover.
One of the more significant moves came when Anaheim sent Mason McTavish to the St. Louis Blues, and by the numbers of this offseason, it may have been the Ducks’ best piece of business.
McTavish had a rough season and even dropped from top-six center to bottom-six winger at one point. In return, Anaheim landed two first-round picks, which is a strong haul for a player whose skating and defensive play made him movable in the first place.
McTavish was once a third-overall pick, but whether he reaches that level now becomes St. Louis’ problem.
Verbeek also tried to patch the blue line by adding Nick Jensen, a veteran right-shot defenseman who has been reliable for a long time. The issue is where he fits.
At this stage of his career, he doesn’t really look like a true top-four answer, even if he’s being paid like a useful piece. Jensen could work on the bottom pair, but if Anaheim has to push him higher in the lineup, there’s a real chance he runs into trouble.
Right now, Ian Moore and Tristan Luneau appear to be the top four options in front of him, and that leaves a lot of uncertainty behind them.
Then came the contract chaos, and that’s where the summer really started to tilt off course. A Philadelphia Flyers offer sheet to Leo Carlsson effectively shut Anaheim out of a lot of other possibilities, while the threat of an offer sheet also boxed the Ducks in during talks with Pavel Mintyukov.
Mintyukov ultimately signed a five-year extension worth $36MM, or $7.2MM annually. But the bigger disruption was the Carlsson offer sheet: five years at $18MM per season.
That move blew up Anaheim’s long-term planning and is likely to throw the cap structure out of whack.
With Carlsson now the highest-paid player in the league, the attention shifts to Gauthier, whose extension had been projected earlier this year at around seven years and $8.8MM annually. That estimate came when Carlsson was expected to land around $11.5MM on a long-term deal, but those numbers no longer mean much after the spending escalation this summer. Gauthier’s deal looms large, and it could chew through a big chunk of future cap flexibility that has already taken a serious hit.
In the end, Anaheim has mostly made its own bed here, especially with the way it has handled its young stars. Verbeek has long had a reputation for being a hard negotiator with younger players, and that approach has now come back around on him.
The one bit of relief is that he avoided locking in long-term money for aging veterans, though he has done that before and may still need to move someone like Alex Killorn to make room for Gauthier’s next contract. The McTavish trade also gives the Ducks a path to being cap-compliant next season.
Still, if McTavish takes off in St. Louis, that deal could age into a bargain for the Blues and another mark against Verbeek in what has already been a rough summer.