A team can only fall behind in games for so long when they're down 3-0 in the series before it eventually catches up to them, and that's what happened to Dallas on Monday night. They had comeback wins in Games 4 and 5 to even push Vegas to a Game 6, but the run-good ran out. The Stars fell behind early on as William Carrier patiently waited out Jake Oettinger when he was left alone in front to launch home a backhand, giving Vegas a 1-0 lead fewer than four minutes into the game. A power play goal from William Karlsson and a later finish from Keegan Kolesar put Dallas down 3-0 after just 14 minutes and the writing was on the wall. Vegas poured it on for a 6-0 win and are now off to the Stanley Cup Final for the second time in six seasons.

It was a great game from the newly-reformed fourth line of Kolesar-Roy-Carrier, who figured into two goals and were chaotic in the offensive zone. If they can bring that type of performance to the Final against Florida, it would give them one decided edge in line matchups.

Karlsson ended the night with two goals and that pushed his playoff total to 10. He had just 14 tallies through 82 regular season games and 10 over his previous 46 playoff contests. He has quietly been one of the big stories for Vegas in the postseason along with Eichel, Marchessault, and Adin Hill. Hill stopped all 23 shots he faced for the shutout.

There'll be more on both teams, and the Final, in the coming days, but this is a very good Vegas squad. They won the Western Conference in the regular season, needed just 17 games for their first three series wins, are getting reliable netminding from Adin Hill, and look to have four lines that can match up well with Florida. It should be a fast-paced Stanley Cup that I can't wait to watch.

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This is just me talking out loud, but it sure feels as if Buffalo is going to make a big trade this summer, doesn't it? They find themselves in the unique situation of having several solid contributors being on entry-level contracts like Jack Quinn, JJ Peterka (whom Dobber wrote about in his Ramblings yesterday), Peyton Krebs, and Owen Power. They do have to consider extensions for Krebs, Power, and Casey Mittelstadt, as well as Rasmus Dahlin, in the very near-term, but those extensions also give them cost certainty.

I bring this up because as it is, Buffalo has 11 forwards signed for 2023-24, not including Zemgus Girgensons (UFA) and Tyson Jost (RFA). If they're brought back, their forward group is completely full. The team also has Matt Savoie, Jiri Kulich, and Noah Ostlund on the way very soon. (Even Isak Rosen is drawing pretty good reviews.) They can send guys down or stuff someone in the AHL, but clearing room for an impact player (maybe on defence) is something they have the cap space and assets to do. It would not shock me to see them be a big player for high-end RFAs like Alex DeBrincat, Jesper Bratt, or Evan Bouchard. Whether they offer what is expected, or the teams have a desire to move those players, is another question, but it's all lining up for the Sabres to make a huge splash.

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Finally, we have reached the end of my series of reviewing the fantasy seasons of each of the non-playoff teams. This series has touched on 15 of the 16 franchises that did not reach the postseason, including Chicago and Columbus most recently. Today's Ramblings will get to the team that finished dead last in the NHL: the Anaheim Ducks.

Like the other Ramblings in this series, we are going to cover the fantasy successes and failures, as well as the improvements and declines, for both the team and individual players. The end will cover where the team goes from here.

As always, the data will be from our own Frozen Tools or Natural Stat Trick, unless otherwise indicated.

Successes

As with most of the teams in this range, and especially here, successes were minimal. No player reached 25 goals, no player exceeded 65 points (and only two exceeded 50), no player reached 20 PPPs, and no player reached 3.0 shots per game. There was not a single Anaheim skater to finish higher than 144^th in Yahoo!'s scoring system, which means their most valuable fantasy player was valued at the end of the 12^th round of a 12-team league. So, yeah, not many successes.

The best we can do is say Troy Terry, like Boone Jenner in Columbus, was a push. His preseason Yahoo! Fantasy ADP was around the 147^th pick and he finished as the 144^th player in their scoring system. His plus/minus hurt him here, so he would have been even better, but if Anaheim's top fantasy option saw his goals per game fall by one-third from a year ago, well, we kind of get the picture here. I do wonder if this season made fantasy players realize that, right now, Terry is still a better player than Trevor Zegras, despite their chasm in preseason ADPs. Zegras clearly still has tremendous upside, but Terry is an excellent offensive player that does not get the press of his younger teammate, and that can help the savvy fantasy owner.

Though the skaters were a mess, we do have to point out John Gibson's campaign. This makes five straight seasons playing on bad Ducks teams, a stretch that has seen them finish dead last in the NHL in expected goal share per 60 minutes and expected goals against per 60 minutes, per Evolving Hockey. By that website's Goals Against Above Expected mark, Gibson was a negative, and while that does include team quality, he was still behind arguably the worst defensive team in modern NHL history. (Not hyperbole, either, as they were a distant last in shots allowed per minute in any season since 2007.) That Gibson finished the season as a top-15 goalie by Yahoo!'s scoring gives us an indication of how much heavy lifting he did this season, so kudos to him.

Failures

Aside from Terry being fine, and Gibson actually performing well, everyone else did not succeed.

We will start with Zegras, who finished his rookie 2021-22 campaign with 23 goals and 61 points in 75 games, earning him runner-up as Rookie of the Year. He received nearly an extra minute per game of TOI in 2022-23 but saw his goals, points, power-play points, and shots per game all decline. He was likely drafted somewhere around the 9^th or 10^th round, depending on format, and finished outside the top-12 rounds by Yahoo! value. The bigger problem is that by Corey Sznajder's tracking data, Zegras fell off the map in things like individual scoring chances, contributions to his team's scoring chances, controlled zone entries per minute, and so on. Here is what he did in some of these measures in his rookie season:

And here's how he fared by those same measures this past campaign:

Those are some large declines.

Of course, it was a bad year for almost everyone in Anaheim, particularly the blue line (they missed Jamie Drysdale), and Zegras paid the price. This isn't a black mark on his permanent record or anything, but it should give us a bit of pause before lauding immediate superstardom upon him.

It is hard to put into words the season John Klingberg had in Anaheim. His defensive metrics were falling off by the end of his Dallas tenure and oh my heavens did things get worse. With Klingberg on the ice at 5-on-5, the team gave up an incredible 43.7 shots against per 60 minutes. For context, as a team on the penalty kill in the regular season, the Boston Bruins gave up 44.6 shots against per 60 minutes. It is the worst mark of any defenceman in the Behind The Net era, or since 2007, and by a wide margin. (Though, to be fair, a bunch of other Anaheim defencemen are at the bottom of the list, too. It's just that Klingberg is at the bottom of even that Anaheim list.) So, no, not a fantasy success.

The last player we'll discuss briefly is Mason McTavish. Like many, I thought he had a real shot at Rookie of the Year this season, but the absolutely horrific team performance around him made that a tall task He did finish with 17 goals and 43 points, though, and was third on the team in points per minute, trailing Zegras and Terry. One-third of McTavish's production came on the power play, too, so his 5-on-5 production was not very good. He didn't reach the heights we hoped for him this season but, all things considered, a good rookie effort, and there's nothing that happened this season that should be of concern for McTavish's long-term fantasy value.  

Improvements

Lol.

Actually, there was one: they generated 15% more shots per minute on the man advantage. It didn't do much as their shooting percentage, and thus goals per minute, cratered when compared to 2021-22, but that did improve. So, it's something.

Declines

Lmao.

Where They Go From Here

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: like Columbus, Montreal, and the rest at the bottom, the big hope was landing the first overall pick in June's Entry Draft. Adding Connor Bedard may have changed their approach to the offseason, but they didn't win the Lottery, and are picking second overall instead. They should still get a great player, but Edmonton got Connor McDavid in 2015 while Buffalo got Jack Eichel. No team would turn down Eichel, but every team would prefer McDavid, and by a lot. Anaheim's 2023 lottery is like that.   

Setting the Draft aside, Anaheim is still at an interesting crossroads. The only skaters the team has signed past the 2023-24 season are Ryan Strome, Frank Vatrano, Brock McGinn, and Cam Fowler. That doesn't include the young stars like Drysdale or Zegras, but it also doesn't give the team a real veteran core to build the young core around. This isn't Pittsburgh re-tooling after the 2015 season, or Colorado having Landeskog-MacKinnon-Nichushkin locked up for most of this decade. The team's best player is probably Troy Terry, an offensive forward with zero 70-point seasons to his name and is a year from free agency. All that is what makes this so interesting.

It means the team has decisions to make. Do they extend Terry long-term or trade him for younger futures to basically usher in the Zegras/Drysdale/Zellweger/Mintyukov era? Do they ride out the final years of the Jakob Silfverberg/Adam Henrique contracts or try to free up immediate cap space? Do they trade Gibson or hold onto him? Some of these may be easy – just keep Henrique around until the 2024 Trade Deadline – but some are not – Gibson has four years left at $6.4M a season with a modified no-trade clause – and that's what makes this all so interesting.  

Regardless of what they do, there are a lot of improvements that need to be made. Consider that even if they improve their goal-scoring by 25% next year – which would be a colossal improvement – they wouldn't even be a top-half goal-scoring team. If they improve their goals against by 25%, they would be in the middle of the league. For reference, 2022-23 was the highest-scoring season in nearly 30 years, and only two teams improved their goal scoring by at least 25% from the year prior: Seattle and Buffalo. The former set the modern record for team 5-on-5 shooting percentage in an 82-game season while the latter is probably the template for what Anaheim hopes to be in two years.

In other words, even if they have gargantuan improvements at both ends of the ice, not in process but in actual results, it would still mean they're still a middle-of-the-road team. All that improvement would still leave them with a worse goal differential (+7) than the one Calgary finished with this season (+8), a year the Flames missed the postseason. That should give some indication of just how far Anaheim has to go.

That is one of the reasons I wouldn't expect much spending in the offseason. The team has lots of forwards signed already – assuming Terry and Zegras are extended, they have 13 forwards with NHL contracts – and despite some UFA/RFA skaters on the blue line, Anaheim's prospect depth is on the blue line. They probably go out and sign 2-3 NHL defencemen but it's unlikely to be an impact guy like Dmitry Orlov (and they shouldn't sign him, either).

When discussing near-term fantasy futures, it is all a question of how good the Anaheim prospects can be in 2023-24. If the team signs a few depth UFA veterans, it means largely the same roster as 2022-23, but with guys like Drysdale, Zellweger, and Mintyukov on defence. Whether Zellweger/Mintyukov are on the roster for the full season is very much an open question, and perhaps their offseason will give us more of an indication here. Regardless, if the 2022-23 Anaheim Ducks roster returns largely the same for 2023-24, we should be cautious just how highly we rate their top stars. Of course, how the market values them will determine their draft-worthiness, but there is a long way to go here before they're a reliable fantasy source.

Previous Offseason Reviews:

Buffalo

Calgary

Pittsburgh

Nashville

Ottawa

Vancouver

Detroit

St. Louis

Washington

Arizona

Philadelphia

San Jose

Montreal

Chicago

Columbus