Ducks in a row
Go Ducks Quack Quack
Last season the Ducks had been 11th in goals per game at 2.78 and 20th against at 2.70 according to NHL.com
Offense should be better and for some reason i think it would help get better at GA. Hope. That is just hope, probably, because last years GA was just brutal
I don't think we will go through the inury gauntlet of last year and do think goaltending will be better. I think goal scoring will be slightly worse, around league average.
So, I'll predict 14th on offense, 9th on defense.
Why would our offense be worse? I think it's safe to say losing well over 200 man-games from our skaters due to injury last season hurt our offense significantly and we were still 11th in the league. If you think we're going to be a lot healthier then why shouldn't we be more productive too?
Last year Perry was out with mumps and injury missing a lot of games and that had a effect on our offense.
Last year we had a lot of man games lost from the blueline I don't think will have so many games missed this coming season. Also last year Gibson was hurt and we didn't have the goalie depth we have now so we won't be having a LaBarbera and Bryzgalov starting 13 games.
I am expecting both goals for and against to improve. I think our offense should be in the top 10 and hoping the power play improves. If we are in the bottom half of the league in goals against again I would be surprised and not happy.
Luck, and we lost more production than we gained. An insane amount of offense came from our defense last year, I think it's naive to expect the same.
We lost Beleskey, Palmieri, Etem, Fleischmann and Beauchemin who combined for 53 goals. They're being replaced by Hagelin, Horcoff, Stewart, Santorelli and Bieksa who combined to score 57 goals last season. We flat out did not lose more offense. And so what if a lot of our offense came from our defense? Other than Beauch's totals those numbers weren't a fluke. If it were based on high power play numbers that could be one thing but that wasn't the case at all.
The totals I provided our based off career averages of each player. In order for us not to hit at least 230 goals (which is about what we scored last year) each player would either have to be stagnant or digress. That's crazy. This team wasn't lucky last year. They were incredibly unlucky with injuries. They should have scored a lot more than they did. Luck! Give me a break.
Hard for me to see Fowler shooting 8% next year when he's a career 6% shooter
Hard for me to see Vatanen shooting 10% for another full season (that's an unprecedented shooting percentage for a defenseman - not a knock on him, he's still really good. I just expect his goals to go down and assists to probably go up next year)
Hard for me to see Bieksa shooting anywhere near the 10% Beauch shot last year (lol).
So yeah, the D was lucky when it came to goal scoring last year. The good news is that with the exception of Beauch (bieksa), they're all still developing and could end up increasing their shot totals this year (hopefully)
The forwards are better all around this year but Beleskey rode high last year with some high shooting % all year so I don't expect that to necessarily repeat. Hagelin should be good for 15-20, Stewart should be good for 15-20, Silfverberg is going to score at least 15, probably closer to 20 (significant Increase over last year). I think we'll get more than 9 from Maroon this year too.
I'm going to say we'll score just barely more this year than we did last year. We'll also keep more pucks out of the net this year.
7th in goals for, 13th in goals against...pretty good improvement all around
I don't think we will go through the inury gauntlet of last year and do think goaltending will be better. I think goal scoring will be slightly worse, around league average.
So, I'll predict 14th on offense, 9th on defense.
Last season the Ducks had been 11th in goals per game at 2.78 and 20th against at 2.70 according to NHL.com