How Do You Solve A Problem Like Abundance?

Anaheim is letting their unexpected success get in the way of a Grade A opportunity. Despite what their early season success would have you believe, the Ducks are far from a threat to play any games, let alone make any noise, in late April and early May. This is not, for the record, a bad thing nor an indictment of this team. It is simply an appreciation for where this team is in their contending cycle, which is to say early or still building, whichever you prefer. That being said, I can certainly appreciate that after several long years of hanging in and around the cellar of the league, culminating in last year’s last place finish, Ducks fans are ready to get this thing back on track and begin the ascent. However, I can’t help but wonder to what degree that impatience is shared by the team’s front office.

The Ducks have four core forwards on the team right now, three natural left-shot centers and a right-shot winger. As of now head coach Greg Cronin has chosen to deploy them in a 3and1 combination, with rookie Leo Carlsson centering Trevor Zegras and Troy Terry on the top line, while asking McTavish to center Ryan Strome and Frank Vatrano on the second. Now, it’s easy to see why the idea of a Zegras, Carlsson, Terry line is so alluring. Three players who can make plays with the puck on their stick, move well away from it, and read the game at a high-level all out there together is the kind of thing that EA lineup dreams are made of. The problem is, you’ve now hyper-concentrated your elite talent into one and a third lines. Even more curious however, is that the aforementioned third of a line perfectly makes the argument for why Anaheim should break up the one.

The thing about the Ducks current second line that makes it so valuable, is that it’s incredibly effective while also being incredibly efficient from a resource allocation perspective. According to NaturalStatTrick.com, the Ducks have played 137:54 minutes at 5v5 with all three of McTavish, Strome, and Vatrano on the ice and 404:37 minutes of 5v5 without them. With those three on the ice the Anaheim has an expected goals for percentage (xGF%) of 53.01%, and without them the rest of the team comes in at a cool 45.05%. For those of you doing the math at home that’s an eight point drop in expected goals share despite the other minutes including the time the Ducks ice their super weapon top line. Oh by the way, that alleged super weapon actually isn’t as effective as the second line is. In 82:21 minutes of 5v5 play the 11-91-19 triumvirate has logged a respectable 52.08 xGF%, which is again nearly a full point below the McTavish led second line, while the rest of the team as a whole comes in at 43.74 xGF%. As it stands now, this is how the Ducks lineup is set when Carlsson is in and Zegras is healthy.

The team has four impact forwards plus two guys having career defining years and the team as a whole still only manages to only muster up a 47.16 xGF% as a whole, which in case you were curious ranks 26th in the league. So, what should they do about it? Well there are, as far as I can see at least, three options. They can leave it all the same, they can break them into pairs, or they can play their three centers at center and figure the rest of it out. As you can probably tell by the tone of the article to this point, I’m not much in favor of the first option. While the team has seen some positive results utilizing this lineup construction, it seems short-sighted and wasteful to take a year with no stakes and waste it playing three of your four best forwards together while hoping two career middle-six guys continue stay hot for 70 games and the bottom six continues to be as low event as possible.

Small Note: For the purposes of this exercise we are going to be doing two things. First, accepting that the fourth line of Johnston, Carrick, and Leason is going to stay the same albeit with the understanding that at any point one or both of Max Jones and Bo Groulx could find their way into the lineup in their place or even potentially higher up the lineup. Second, we are going to stick to players who have already appeared in a game this year, which means that Zegras is going to be part of the calculus here (obviously) but Brock McGinn is not.

Idea 1: Build Around Pairs

The cool thing about having four potentially elite forwards is you can break them up into pairs and then augment those pairs with complimentary depth pieces. The first step in that process is obviously deciding on the pairs you want to build around, and starting there means acknowledging a simple fact, Mctavish and Carlsson are remarkably unlikely to ever play games on the same line together. Sure Cronin could get weird and mix the lines up during a game that the Ducks are struggling to get anything going in, but as Verbeek said this summer the expectation is that if any of Zegras, Carlsson, or McTavish is going to play the wing, it will be Zegras. So from there it’s about pairing up the wings with the pivots and going from there.

Option A: Carlsson-Terry & Zegras-McTavish

This one seems pretty straight forward to me. Carlsson and Terry are both skilled, heady, two-way players who can use a two-man game to dominate possessions and wear down opposing defenses with give-and-go’s and center lane drives. The other benefit of this pairing is both players are really strong in their own ends which would allow Cronin to go top line against top line at his leisure, and also not have much to worry about in terms of opposing coaches doing the same. On the second line here you end up with a pairing McTavish and Zegras which takes a bit of both approach matching an elite skill player in Z with an elite drive player in McTavish. There is also the added benefit of pairing Zegras’s creativity and playmaking with McTavish’s overpowering shot. A line I will never forget is Elite Prospects’ Cam Robinson relaying a comment from a scout that “[McTavish] can shoot it through a car door” on the 2021 draft preview episode of the PDOcast. Add in Zegras’s overt devotion to playing both sides of the puck and McTavish’s continued emergence as a legitimate play-driving engine and you start to see how Cronin can role out both lines to dominate games for 40 minutes a night.

The only potential red flag here is that in their limited minutes together this season, neither of these pairs have played all that well together. Again, using NST’s Line Tool page we can see that Carlsson and Terry have played 122:40minutes together at 5v5 and posted a 45.94 xGF% to go along with a 40% goals for percentage (they’ve scored four and conceded six when paired up). Likewise the Zegras-McTavish pairing has been equally underwhelming in even fewer minutes together, posting a 45.47 xGF% and 0.00 GF% (none for and one against) in 17:37 minutes at 5v5. Now those numbers can certainly improve over time so there isn’t any reason to discount them off the rip immediately. Plus you can absolutely use the third forward spot to help address any perceived shortcomings each pairing may have.

Option B: Zegras-Carlsson & McTavish-Terry

The other option, obviously, is to start off with a top line of Leo and Trevor. This combination allows you to put a guy who thrives with puck on his stick with a guy who is so effective even without it. Carlsson has shown an ability to use his size, skill, and smarts to eat up space around the net and the ability to get shots off his stick in the blink of an eye; an ability that pairs quite nicely with a player like Z who loves to hold the puck and use his smarts and elite passing to create opportunities for his line-mates. Having a player like Zegras be able to get in on the forecheck creating chaos, confusion, and the occasional turnover that a player like Leo who reads the game so well can exploit by making well timed drives into the zone and towards the net.

Then, on the second line you have the pairing of Mason and Troy which, in my humble opinion, allows you to get the most out of Troy Terry’s talent and play style. While he has emerged as the preeminent shooting threat on this team given his 37 goal season in 2021-22 as well as just watching him play, he has always had far more of an innate playmaking ability than he seems to get credit for, and it lends itself to a more balanced attacking style from Terry. By playing him on McTavish’s wing, you are creating the foundation of a line that can get up and down the ice with both speed and power, play well in their own end, and has two high-end shooting threats that combine penetrating stick-handling and quick release with McTavish’s center lane drive strength and overpowering shot.

Now this is where we get into the Good News Bad News of it all and I point out that while the Leo-Trevor pairing has the best xGF% of the four with a 51.87 xGF% in 86:52 of 5v5 ice time (with a 33.33 GF% on the back of 2GF and 4GA), the Terry-McTavish pairing has been significantly less stellar. In a paltry 15:22 minutes of 5v5 time the duo has put up a 31.97 xGF% (as well a 0.00 GF% based on 0GF and 1GA) which for everyone playing along at home is… putrid. To whatever extent that it may help alleviate some of those concerns, McTavish and Terry played 340:39 minutes at 5v5 last season and posted a 44.78 xGF% while on the ice together. And while that may not still be the best showing, it looks a lot better when you contrast it with the team’s 36.63 xGF% in 2260:39 minutes of 5v5 play when those two weren’t on the ice together (Yes, last year was actually that bad, you weren’t dreaming).

Idea 2: Let Centers Be Centers

The other option here is to let positional rigidity win out and play all of Zegras, Carlsson, and McTavish at center and go three deep from the jump. Over the last decade or so we have seen front offices, coaches, and analysts alike all stress the importance of teams being able to “roll four lines”. To my mind the ultimate example of this was then Capitals head coach Bruce Boudreau playing his 3rd line in overtime against the Ducks because they were the ones generating the best chances all game. A decision for which he was ultimately vindicated when that very same line scored the game winning goal.

More recent examples include the back-to back champion Tampa Bay Lightning, the 2022 Colorado Avalanche, and to a lesser extent the 2009 champion Pittsburgh Penguins. All of these teams had multiple lines they could get over the boards at any point in the game with the reasonable expectation that they would not only be able to survive those minutes, but could actually just straight up win them. They were able to accomplish this of course in no small part due to the presence of two 100-point superstar centers in Crosby and Malkin, but they also had a young Jordan Staal who was already one of the better defensive centers in the league. So why can’t Anaheim do this? I mean, after all, isn’t that fundamentally at the heart of the the second line’s success? Play your young stud at the position he most excels at and surround him with the right mix of complementary line mates, and watch the goals machine go brrrrr.

If we start from a place that assumes the second line’s success to this point in the season has earned them the right to stay together until it completely stops working, then that means the totality of this exercise is about finding the correct combinations of wings to play with Carlsson and Zegras respectively. To that end I suppose the first and most important question is thus: who does Troy Terry play with? To my eye, the most likely place for him is on Carlsson’s line where the two of them can demonstrate the aforementioned two way capability that makes them so potentially dangerous as a unit. This answer also naturally lends itself to answering another important question for this exercise, where does Alex Killorn fit in? Again I would say that the nature of the question belies the answer. If Killorn is of a quality enough to the point that he is the second name off the board in finding placements, and I certainly think he is, then that means he should be paired with the remaining center. Trevor, Alex. Alex, Trevor. Which means to this point we have filled out seven of the top nine forward spots, leaving us with a lineup card that looks like this:

So the question then becomes, who gets the remaining two spots? So far those two openings in the top-nice have been filled by Adam Henrique (C/LW) and Jakob Silfverberg (RW/LW), and with good reason. Both are smart, veteran players who know who and what they are, and what they bring to the lineup. Henrique still has a fair bit left in the tank and has centered the third line at times this season, but the questions about what professional Draco Malfoy cosplayer Silfverberg is still capable of night in and night out are not without merit. He was never the strongest skater on the ice and years of injuries and general wear and tear from multiple deep playoff runs has taken it’s toll on his mobility. Likewise his ability to produce offense was steady, if underwhelming, and was largely the product of his ability to get into open spaces that allowed him to get the most out of a quick and accurate snapshot. Again, as his mobility continues to erode his ability to get into those spots as quickly and effectively as he had at his peak will continue to diminish. All of this is to say, is he really the best option for the final top-nine forward spot and if not, who can they use to supplant him? Unfortunately, he might be.

Anaheim has a couple of options they can pursue in terms of trying to address the need for a more… serious winger to play with Zegras should they look to go the triple center route. They can elevate Brett Leason as a reward for his strong play to start the year. They can break up the McTavish line and move either Vatrano or Strome to Z’s wing. They can go out and get one of the players rumored to be available for trade. Or they can reach down to the AHL and pull up one of the young wingers from San Diego, likely Pavol Regenda (7G+2A in 11GP) or Jacob Perrault (4G+2A in 9GP). Ultimately though, the most likely option is the one we have to this point tried to find a way around, playing Jakob Silfverberg on Zegras’s wing and hoping that the mix of Z’s creativity and Killorn’s tenacious forechecking, puck-retrieving style create the kind of spaces and opportunities that the Swedish wing has historically been able to capitalize on.

The Verdict

In my heart of hearts I want to say that in the end the team should go with Idea 2 and let the natural positions of the players win out in the end, even if only for this year. Take advantage of the fact that you really might have more of these dudes than most other teams in the league. Go three deep down the middle and play an aggressive, high-octane, attacking style that forces other teams back onto their heels and make them react to you. Set the tone ya’ll, you gotta set the tone.

Unfortunately, I can’t in good conscience say that should be the take away here. The Ducks simply do not have the necessary personnel to survive, let alone execute at a high-level, that style of play on a consistent basis over the course of a season. At least, not at there moment. For now though, I think the first idea is the one that makes the most sense and only more so when you look at the roster. Take your four forwards and find the two most impactful pairs you can. Hell, simply swapping Troy Terry and Ryan Strome at their respective right wing slots opens up a lot of interesting possibilities stylistically, and that doesn’t even account for McGinn’s eventual return or any AHL call-ups.

At the end of the day, there are three answers to the very new and very fun question of, “what do we do with all this young talent?”. The first option is the one that Coach Cronin seems to be a fan of, figuring out which three players are best suited to play together and which single player is most capable of driving their own line. The second option is to split them into pairs. Find the right Wing & Center combinations and get maybe 85% of the raw horsepower of three of them together but for twice as long. The third option is to completely disregard the notion of a true top line and embrace the highest possible ideals of a top-nine forward group. Asking your best players to be your best players and get the most out of their teammates is not an absurd notion. You can make a rational and defensible case for each one to be sure. But I do think that the current choice of a 3and1 setup leaves the most to be desired, not only in terms of present flexibility, but in potential and opportunity as well.