What do the Ducks do now?

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Well, that was a little anticlimactic.

General manager Pat Verbeek and the Anaheim Ducks have spent months setting up a summer of big acquisitions, as they entered the offseason with over $38 million in salary cap space and an openly stated goal of making the playoffs next season.

It began with Verbeek on April 19: “I expect us to be very active and aggressive.” Owner Henry Samueli on May 8: “You don’t have to pinch pennies anymore. Do what it takes to make us a contender.” Verbeek again on June 12: “I’m looking to improve the team in just about every area.” Verbeek once more on June 23: “I'm looking at everything. Obviously there's free agency, but there's trade. I'm exploring trades.”

And now, staring down the barrel of the Fourth of July, the Ducks have made just one free agent signing and three trades, with just one deal that didn’t require sending a productive fan-favorite the other direction.

Here’s Anaheim’s offseason ledger so far:

• OUT: Combined 34 goals, 59 assists for 93 points–Trevor Zegras (trade), John Gibson (trade), Isac Lundestöm (free agent), Brett Leason (free agent), Robby Fabbri (free agent), Brock McGinn (free agent) and Oliver Kylington (free agent)

• IN: Combined 56 goals, 71 assists for 127 points–Mikael Granlund (free agent), Chris Kreider (trade), Ryan Poehling (trade) and Petr Mrázek (trade)

• NET GAIN: 22 goals, 12 assists and only 34 points from last season’s numbers (and a net goals of 20 goals allowed, but Mrázek was on a pretty rough Chicago team most of the season). 

That gain probably projects out to just one player of worth, which makes sense when you consider adding Chris Krieder and Ryan Poehling and losing Trevor Zegras–also remembering Zegras only played 57 games, and Kreider and Poehling both played 68. But that doesn’t feel like enough, does it?

What does that all mean? Where does that leave the Ducks?

It leaves Anaheim still without the impact top-six forward that Verbeek said he was seeking in just about every media availability from the trade deadline until now, and none left to pursue in free agency.

Despite having the cap space to put the most money on the table, Anaheim wasn’t able to snatch up any of the top impact free agent goal scorers, as Mitch Marner went to Vegas in a sign-and-trade before the signing period on Monday, Brock Boeser stayed with Vancouver on Tuesday and Nikolaj Ehlers signed with Carolina on Thursday.

With all the movement in and out, Anaheim has only spent just over $9 million of that opening $38 million of space, meaning they have nearly $30 million open. Even when Lukáš Dostál, Mason McTavish and the other restricted free agents sign, the Ducks will still have plenty of space to work with.

So, what do the Ducks do with it? Let’s look at Anaheim’s three paths forward for the rest of this offseason:

Free Agency

It’s the preferred mode of business when you’re looking to build, but as Verbeek has noted previously, “It takes two to tango.” The top targets of an already thin free agent class have been grabbed, from Marner, Ehlers, Boeser and Granlund in the upper tier to Pius Suter, Jonathan Drouin and Andrew Mangiapane in the next tier down. 

The top forward still available is Jack Roslovic, a 28-year-old center that can shift to right wing. Roslovic matched a career high with 22 goals in Carolina last year, a bounce back from a pair of down seasons in Columbus. (Troy Terry, McTavish and Kreider all netted 22 goals last season.)

Again, not an impact scorer, but the 6-foot-1, 198-pound forward would round out the Ducks’ middle-six depth for around $3-4 million. Also would be a welcome right-hand shot in a forward corps of lefties (only Troy Terry and Ryan Strome are righties).

As a pure winger, Victor Olofsson (29 years old, 15 goals in 56 games for Vegas) provides a hard shot on the left side, but not an overly physical or defensively sound player. Jeff Skinner (33 years old, 16 goals in 72 games) has streaks of magic left and wouldn’t be a terrible power play add. However, both are still bit pieces.

Trade Market

The most difficult of the three options, but the one with the most potential impact. Who is and isn’t actually available at this point is hard to discern, but let’s take a spin on the rumor wheel.

If Jason Robertson is actually available in Dallas, it’s hard to imagine any team in the league not making at least one phone call on him, particularly the Ducks. The 25-year-old Arcadia native would be quite a fit back in SoCal with 35 goals and 80 points last season, not to mention a 6-foot-3, 207-pound frame.

The Stars over the salary cap, but only by nearly $1.8 million, which can be moved other ways to keep Robertson in Texas. Robertson does make $7.75 million next season with rumors that Dallas won’t want to go over $10 million per season when he becomes an RFA next summer.

With the salary cap going up another $8 million each of the next two summers, the Ducks would have more than enough room to negotiate with Robertson, but his extended rights would mean a hefty trade package going back.

Anaheim has plenty of young defensemen now and in the stable to use as bargaining chips (does the 5-foot-10 Olen Zellweger fit into Verbeek’s future plans? Do you make Tristan Luneau or Stian Solberg available before knowing their NHL worth?). Draft picks are certainly not a problem to move, but would a deal require a roster forward, or one of the Ducks growing stable of first-round forwards in addition to a young defenseman?

Trevor Zegras would have been a decent trade chip, but that ship has sailed. (Actually, is he available? He’d be quite useful to this Ducks roster.)

Elsewhere, Anaheim swung and missed for Jonathan Marchessault in free agency last season, but after a down year in Nashville, could he be pried to the West Coast? The 34-year-old still netted 21 goals and 35 assists last season, but the four-year term ($5.5 million per season) would be a lot to chew.

Is a Ducks reunion for Rickard Rakell worth a shot? The 32-year-old put up career highs of 35 goals and 35 assists, his best numbers since 2017-18 in Anaheim, but that was nearly double his total a season prior with three times the power play points.

The Swede has three years remaining on his contract at $5 million per, but also a question of is he a Verbeek-type player?

Stand Pat

The final option is that the Ducks have already made the moves they were going to make, and this is the 2025-26 opening night roster.

Honestly, going through all of Verbeek’s comments since the trade deadline, there has been a gradual pull back from the initial “active and aggressive” decree after the season ended.

After the Kreider trade, Verbeek said he wanted to “go through it all,” that he wanted to see where free agency could lead to and shifted to making sure “that everybody is supported from the top down to be better.”

When asked if the Zegras trade was a sign he was going to be more aggressive, Verbeek said, “I don’t know–aggressive–obviously, it takes two to tango to try and go after free agency.” In that same vein, Verbeek said, “there’s no (extra) pressure” in trying to land a major player in free agency, and they were going to go about the process.

This was after he said that the Zegras trade was made with an eye towards “retooling” the roster to find players that “fit cohesively” and “complement” each other. At that time, Verbeek also noted, “you can't always have the most skilled guys on a line and expect that line to be great.”

On the night before trading John Gibson, Verbeek said he was “not sure at this point” regarding trades, saying that the Ducks were continuing to look at a bunch of different things and he couldn’t “project anything that could happen from our side at this point.”

Finally, on Tuesday, a day after many major potential free agents re-upped in their current spots, Marner moved in the sign-and-trade and Anaheim landed Granlund in a thinned out free agent market, Verbeek was asked if that thinner market made him think about trades any more than he had.

“Does it make me think about it? No, I mean, you know, in the next couple days, I'll talk to the general managers and just see what teams are looking to do,” Verbeek said, “but I'm not sure at this point that there's anything that we can do, unless I get surprised. So we'll see.”

So, all of that considered, maybe Kreider, Poehling and Granlund was Verbeek’s retooling of the roster. Maybe it was simply getting players more cohesive to Joel Quenneville’s “fast and hard” vision that complemented each line’s skills better.

Verbeek said he wasn’t disappointed in how the free agent market thinned out, and that he even expected it to do so. He said that Granlund was one of the team’s plans, and, in line with the cohesive and complementary thoughts, gave the Ducks “four balanced lines.”

As anticlimactic that would be from the “active and aggressive” bluster from the start of the offseason, it’s entirely possible that Verbeek has made his moves, and aside from locking up Dostál and McTavish, he will stand pat.

But is that enough?

Does the impact of Quenneville on the roster or the assumed improvement on special teams with assistants Jay Woodcroft running the power play and Ryan McGill helming the penalty kill do enough to move the needle and end a seven-season playoff drought?

Does the anticipated growth of Leo Carlsson, Cutter Gauthier and McTavish cover that impact scoring hole?

It can’t help but feel like there’s still a Trevor Zegras-shaped gap of skill, creativity and promise in the Anaheim line-up, especially when a fourth-line center is all the Ducks got in return for him and the only forward addition since is a hard-working, versatile middle-six player in Granlund.

There will forever be the unanswered question of what Zegras could have been under an actual NHL head coach in Quenneville, and at the very least, what Zegras would be worth in a post-free agency trade compared to what Anaheim received last week.

It all leaves many asking the question, “...is that it?”

It certainly feels like it can’t be.