For about 30 games, the Ducks were sporting a glossy “new and improved” sticker on their packaging.
They went from seven consecutive sub-.500 seasons to, at one point, owning the second-best points percentage in the NHL. That was an even more drastic about-face than their opponent Monday, the San Jose Sharks, has made this season.
“In the grand scheme of things, we’ve taken a huge step this year,” center Mason McTavish said. “That’s not our end goal [though], we want to make the playoffs and we want to win the Stanley Cup.”
But since their seven-game win streak ended on Nov. 9, they’ve won consecutive games just twice and more than two in a row just once. They’ve also encountered many of the same issues under their pricey new coaching staff that they did under the previous budget-friendly regime.
In the first month of the campaign, the Ducks had a top 10 power play, sitting ninth in the NHL. Since then, they’ve ranked 31st of 32 franchises, not unlike last season when they finished dead last.
On the penalty kill, their No. 28 standing is negligibly better than last season’s No. 29 finish, while the Ducks are now the most defensively porous team overall on a per-game basis.
Overall offensively, they were No. 2 in the league in terms of goals per game on Dec. 2, but since then have placed 24th.
In their last outing, their ice-cold power play that had been flat-out frozen on the road scored an academic goal. They were already trailing 4-0 to the offensively challenged Kings, who had scored two or fewer goals in seven straight games as well as 20 of 36 games overall this season. They trounced the Ducks, 6-1, behind their first four-goal period and first hat trick of 2025-26, from Alex Laferriere.
The Ducks also thawed out the Utah Mammoth, who bombarded them 7-0 on Dec. 3, and made a top-flight Stars team from Dallas look like Jean Beliveau’s Montreal Canadiens in an 8-3 shellacking on Dec. 19. To their credit, the Ducks won three straight after the defeat by Utah and bounced back with a win after the Dallas loss as well.
“I think we all clearly know that this isn’t good enough,” McTavish said. “And when we’ve had these kind of off games, we know it’s all not acceptable, and we know we have to come out the next game and really prove to ourselves that we can play with the top teams in the league and beat them.”
While McTavish and others confined critiques to the past six or eight games that hadn’t been “up to standard” and featured those blowout losses, the Ducks have been pushed around or skated past consistently over much of the season.
Per Natural Stat Trick, they have given up the most five-on-five high-danger chances in the Western Conference, with only the New York Islanders surrendering more in the East. They’re also in a tie for the most high-danger goals allowed this season, at five-on-five and in total.
That lack of oomph in their own end was certainly on display Saturday, when the diminutive Trevor Moore owned Drew Helleson for position on a goal and four Ducks defenders watched mouths agape as Laferriere strolled into the low slot for the first of his three goals.
If recent history is any indicator, Monday’s game could be a full-blown track meet. The Sharks, led by Macklin Celebrini, are also a young, offensively talented and defensively deficient team. The two rivals locked horns on Oct. 11, with the Ducks rallying to win 7-6 in overtime despite facing three different two-goal deficits.