August is a quiet time for NHL news, but a new season is just around the corner. Teams will be taking the ice for training camp in a little over a month, so now is the perfect time to preview the upcoming 2024-25 season. The Anaheim Ducks are one of the more fascinating teams to speculate about. They are in the middle of a six-year playoff drought, and it’s unlikely to stop this season. Despite the hard fortune, Anaheim boasts one of the deepest rosters of young players, including Trevor Zegras, Leo Carlsson, Pavel Mintyukov, and Olen Zellweger.
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While these players bring optimism to a downtrodden franchise, they need to reach their potential in order to help Anaheim out of the basement. A breakout season from these players essentially means they’ve raised their own standards and can be relied on as a bedrock for a franchise looking to build a competitor.
Earlier in August, THW’s Michael Ostrower listed a breakout candidate for each team. For the Ducks, he chose Mason McTavish. McTavish, the third overall pick from the 2021 NHL Draft, has had two modestly productive seasons in the NHL, with 88 points in 153 games. The 21-year-old center is poised to have a prominent role on the team once again this season.
McTavish’s Role in Vatrano’s Breakout Season
Anaheim’s biggest surprise a season ago was Frank Vatrano racking up 37 goals, the most from a Ducks’ player since Troy Terry’s 37 tallies in 2021-22. A lot had to go right for Vatrano, whose previous high was 24 goals — he was the only player on the roster to appear in all 82 games. He finished with 272 shots on goal, tied with Alex Ovechkin for 20th in the NHL last season, and a hundred more shots than his next-closest teammate. He was also the biggest benefactor of McTavish’s maturation into a top-six center.
Vatrano started the season on fire with 14 goals by early December. The outpouring of goals was consistent, as a four-game goalless streak in mid-November was his longest drought. However, when McTavish went down with an upper-body injury and missed seven games, Vatrano was completely blanked on the scoreboard. Following his center’s return to the lineup, Vatrano scored four goals in the next six games. McTavish and Vatrano shared the ice for 545 minutes and recorded 30 goals, but Vatrano’s 505 minutes without McTavish only resulted in 17, according to Natural Stat Trick.
Similar Production in Fewer Games
McTavish has been a quiet producer in his first two full seasons in the NHL. As a rookie in 2022-23, his 43 points in 80 games was third among first-year players. Last season’s 42 points look like a step back on paper, but his availability makes this a little misleading. He only appeared in 64 games last season, so the nearly identical production is a lot more encouraging.
Additionally, Anaheim’s power play unit was running on a meritocracy last season, which led to McTavish occasionally being moved off the top unit. He had the fifth-most power play minutes among Ducks forwards in a season where Zegras and Carlsson missed more time than he did. Jakob Silfverberg had nearly 23 more minutes than McTavish on the power play. Even if Silfverberg were still on the roster, it would have been hard to imagine that trend continuing for more than one season.
Easy Improvements: Stay Out of the Box & Consistency
The biggest knock on McTavish is his tendency to commit penalties. The Ducks were the most penalized team in the league a year ago with 330 power play opportunities against them. For his part, McTavish spent 86 minutes in the box, third on the team behind pugilists Radko Gudas and Ross Johnston. The frequency he was sent to the box was pretty incredible — 31 out of his 64 games saw him sitting in the sin bin at least once.
Additionally, I’d love to see McTavish end a season on a positive note. He missed the final game of his rookie year due to injury, and he notched only three points in his final 14 games leading up to the finale. Last season he missed the final six games of the campaign, preceded by a paltry four points in 16 games. This is where shoring up the inconsistencies can lead to a huge boon in scoring. If he maintains the production from his first 48 games of the season (38 points, about .79 points per game), he clears the 50-point threshold despite missing 18 games.
If the Ducks are going to improve on their 30th-ranked 27-50-5 record from a year ago, it’ll likely be because McTavish stays healthy and drives one of the top-six lines to new personal bests. He played at a 65-point pace for most of last season, so something north of 70 points feels like a reasonable threshold for a breakout season.
