By Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Shayna Goldman A poor defensive team with next to no star power, thanks to a still-dormant youth movement, the Anaheim Ducks once again find themselves near the bottom. Patience is key here for a team that’s slowly rebuilding piece by piece. If the time comes, Anaheim’s rise will be dramatic — a breakthrough that makes the Ducks a force to be reckoned with for years to come.
Pinpointing that breakthrough isn’t easy, but it doesn’t feel very likely to happen this season. The projection It’s hard to predict breakout seasons. We can fashion a guess based on age curves, but those generally only predict a modest bump each year.
That’s what’s expected here from Anaheim, whose true talent baseline gets bumped up by two goals after accounting for age. That’s the fourth-highest mark in the league where the average is minus-4. Advertisement And it’s partly why the Ducks aren’t expected to do much this season, with a projected 70-point season.
That’s an 11-point improvement from last year — though it’s also a three-point drop-off from where they were to start last season. The storyline heading into last season was similar to the one heading into this season: that maybe this is the year the youth breaks through. But there was just a one-point increase between 2022-23 and 2023-24.
In that sense, the rebuild is feeling stagnant as we all wait for the transformative explosion from the team’s young core, the one that gets th.