The Anaheim Ducks are a Defector-certified Fun Team, despite our firmly entrenched traditionalist bias against the idea of two hockey franchises in the Los Angeles market. The Ducks have spent the last seven years in complete irrelevancy after crashing out of a solid but hardware-free era. Over their time in the toilet, they've stocked up on young talents who, so far this year, have piled up more goals than anyone in the league but Colorado. Their record isn't quite as good as it looked a couple weeks ago, but 13-6-1 is still very strong for a team that went 35-37-10 last year. A first-place team doesn't stay in first place without some scoring from unlikely places, and on Wednesday night the Ducks fought through a tough game against the Bruins and emerged victorious, 4-3, because they received goals from the oddest quartet of scorers I've seen all season.
First, let me tell you who the good Ducks are. Leo Carlsson, 20 years old, is looking like their 1C of the future and currently sits tied for fifth in the NHL in points. Cutter Gauthier, a 21-year-old whom Anaheim snagged from an unhappy situation in Philly, plays aggressive hockey and paces the team in goals. And then there's 34-year-old Chris Kreider, king of the power play, who's experiencing a resurgence after being discarded by the Rangers.
I can go on. Lukáš Dostál is enjoying a good start in net. The third overall pick in 2024, Beckett Sennecke, is already racking up points and showing a lot of potential. Another former Ranger, the stiff checker Jacob Trouba, is helping anchor the defensive corps, along with a younger, more skilled blue-liner in Jackson LaCombe. Troy Terry, who debuted in 2018 and has yet to see a postseason, might finally experience a payoff for all this time spent in Anaheim.
None of those guys matter to this blog! None of them. Put them out of your head.
Instead, this win was delivered by four players who, heading into Wednesday at the Duck Pond, had scored a combined two goals all season. Let's learn their names.
First up is Jansen Harkins, a 28-year-old forward who has spent his 20s living on the border between the NHL and the minors. Harkins started the season injured and came back at the end of October, but he rarely gets more than 10 minutes of ice time per game. On Wednesday, he received eight, but he made them count. Early in the first, a long Anaheim shot deflected off Harkins's linemate, Ross Johnston, in front of the net. Johnston followed the rebound to the goalie's right and took a shot off the pads, where it angled perfectly for Harkins to get the tap-in.
Four minutes later, Radko Gudas doubled the lead. The 35-year-old defenseman is in fact the Ducks' captain, but he's far more known for his penalty minutes than his scoring. In 81 games last year, Gudas sniffed out the net exactly once, but he matched that season total with a slap shot from the point that hit a Boston skate and flew up over Joonas Korpisalo and into the top of the net. Don't worry: He got into a fight later on, too.
With the score 2-1 in the second period, it was Ryan Strome's time to shine. Strome was the fifth pick in an absolutely stacked 2011 draft, and one of the more disappointing choices from it. Eventually, after passing through the Islanders and Oilers organizations, he found his footing as a Ranger, but that franchise saw him as expendable enough that he could sign a five-year, $25 million deal with the Ducks in the summer of 2022. He's been forgettable and just got back from injury a week ago. For his first goal of the season, coming at the very end of a Ducks power play, Strome kept his stick on the ice and redirected a long, wide shot to beat Korpisalo above his shoulder.
And finally, with the score 3-3 and under four minutes to play, we welcome Ian Moore to the stage. A 23-year-old defenseman out of Harvard, Moore was playing in just his 17th career NHL game, but he scored his second career goal with a zooming one-timer from the deep-center of the attacking zone that fought its way through traffic and emerged in the back of the net. I have no idea how this puck missed everything except the twine, but it gave the Ducks another pair of points.
Let me try my hand at attaching a moral to this story. Particularly as I've watched my own Detroit Red Wings rebuild, I've thought a lot of about the value of an individual roster slot. In some sports, an incoming rookie on a bad team, like a Victor Wembanyama, can make an outsized impact quickly. But in hockey, the load is spread much wider, and even if teams tank their way repeatedly into a strong first line, that still leaves about two-thirds of the game unaccounted for.
Those other two-thirds can be brutal—filled with replacement-level veterans and AHL-level talents who have been overpromoted because there's no one else to fill the job. But if a team can make a few savvy moves, you might start to get more interested, or even optimistic, about what's going on there. Say someone like Ian Moore turns out to be NHL-ready from the get-go. Say a vet like Kreider arrives with gas still left in the tank, and lightens the burden of another player who was maybe overloaded with responsibility, like Strome. Say a kid like the 22-year-old second-rounder Olen Zellweger has a little time and space to develop. Slowly, the tide rises. More and more minutes are accounted for by players who are capable of doing the jobs they're tasked with.
The Ducks' situation still feels precarious. One good quarter of the season might have them first in their division, but the teams behind them are still a stone's throw away. A win like Wednesday's, however, is one piece of evidence that they're a genuinely good team—a group that can win without their best guys carrying them. I'll let you forget about Jansen Harkins for now, though. He probably won't be on the test.
