The Ducks Have Had An Uneven Offseason

The Anaheim Ducks finished last season feeling pretty good about the gains the team had made, going from a non-playoff team to a second-round elimination. At the time, Ducks’ GM Pat Verbeek stated that the team would continue to build around its young core while attempting to add complementary veterans. That was around mid-May, and since then the Ducks have done a lot of roster shuffling, and not much of it has been good. The Ducks have effectively lost the entire right side of their defensive core, have been targeted by offer sheets (or the threat of offer sheets) twice, and now they are in a bit of a pickle when it comes to forward Cutter Gauthier’s next extension. All in all, it’s been a forgettable two months for Verbeek and company, and it’s tough to imagine how they will navigate the noise to enter next season with a roster better than the one they had this past year.

The offseason began with the announcement that Troy Terry would miss the first few months of the regular season after hip impingement surgery. The timing isn’t ideal for the Ducks, but it was certainly a better option than having the surgery mid-season or at the start of the regular season. The 28-year-old is a big piece of the Ducks’ offence, and they will feel his absence in the early going next season.

The transactions this offseason started inconspicuously with Anaheim trading the rights to a couple of pending UFAs, John Carlson and Radko Gudas. Anaheim even picked up forward A.J. Greer in the Gudas swap and signed him to a four-year deal worth $4.25MM per season. Greer is a big risk for the Ducks, as he’s had just one career season with more than 30 points, and it happened this past season, when he shot 16.3%, nearly double his career average. Greer could be just scratching the surface of his potential, but at 29 years of age, that feels unlikely.

Next came the Mason McTavish trade with the St. Louis Blues, which was probably the best piece of business Anaheim has done this summer. McTavish struggled immensely last season and was demoted from a top-six center to a bottom-six winger at one point. The deal sent two first-round picks to Anaheim, a solid return for a player whose skating and defensive work made moving him feel like the right decision for Anaheim. It remains to be seen whether McTavish will live up to the potential that made him a third-overall pick, but that will be the Blues’ concern now.

Around the same time as the trade, general manager Verbeek brought in veteran defenseman Nick Jensen to replace the losses on the right side of the defense core. Jensen has been a dependable NHL defender for a long time, but at this stage of his career it’s hard to consider him a top-four fixture, even though he shouldn’t be, given what he’s being paid and where his skills are at. Jensen could be a good fit on the bottom pairing in Anaheim, but if he is elevated in the lineup for any reason, he could struggle. Right now, it appears that Ian Moore and Tristan Luneau could be the top four options in front of Jensen, but that would leave a pile of question marks for Anaheim’s defense.

Then there are the contract extensions, and let’s just say these did not go to plan for Verbeek and company. A Philadelphia Flyers offer sheet to forward Leo Carlsson effectively iced the Ducks out of looking at many other moves, and the threat of an offer sheet boxed the Ducks in during contract negotiations with defenseman Pavel Mintyukov, who signed a five-year extension worth $36MM ($7.2MM AAV). It was the Carlsson offer sheet for five years at $18MM annually that absolutely threw a wrench into the Ducks’ long-term plans and is highly likely to throw their entire salary cap structure out of whack. With Carlsson now the highest-paid player in the league, the attention now turns to Cutter Gauthier and his extension, which was projected earlier this year to be around seven years at $8.8MM annually. That projection came at a time when Carlsson was projected to get roughly $11.5MM on his long-term deal, but those figures are all moot at this point given the escalation in spending that has occurred this offseason. The Gauthier extension is huge for the Ducks and could really burn through their future cap flexibility, which has been badly damaged this summer.

Ultimately, the Ducks have no one to blame but themselves for the mess they’ve made this summer, particularly with the contracts for their young stars. Verbeek long had been known as a GM who was a tough negotiator with young players, and now that has come back to bite him. The good news for Verbeek was that he didn’t commit to long-term deals for aging stars, though he has done that in the past and might be forced to move some of them (Alex Killorn, for example) to create the room under the salary cap to fit Gauthier’s new deal. Another silver lining (in the short term) is that Verbeek moved off McTavish’s deal, which should allow the team to be cap-compliant next season. But if McTavish flourishes in St. Louis, his deal will look like a massive bargain and could turn out to be another blemish on Verbeek’s record in a summer where he took his lumps.