The Ducks have no one to blame for their current situation other than Pat Verbeek

He has not only miscalculated his own negotiating practices, but also how teams value first-round picks and how much they are willing to spend on top-line atlent.

General manager Pat Verbeek and the Anaheim Ducks are not having a particularly good or productive offseason.

A quick recap of the proceedings so far:

• Defensemen John Carlson, Jacob Trouba, Olen Zellweger and Radko Gudas are no longer on the roster. Carlson, Trouba and Gudas were free agency departures, while Zellweger was traded for a second-round pick and prospect Anton Wahlberg. No other outside defensemen have, at this point, been added to the roster.

• The only major outside addition to the NHL roster is the signing of depth forward A.J. Greer, for what was almost certainly too many years and too much money.

• Forward Mason McTavish was traded to the St. Louis Blues for two first-round draft picks in 2026 (Nos. .

• Their best young player, and their top center, Leo Carlsson was signed to a five-year, $90 million offer sheet in restricted free agency by the Philadelphia Flyers this past week. The Ducks have less than a week now to either match the offer, or let Carlsson go for four first-round draft picks.

• While all of that was going on, there was the threat of another offer sheet to restricted free agent defenseman Pavel Mintyukov, resulting in the Ducks needing to sign him to a five-year, $36 million contract extension, paying him like a top-pairing defenseman when he has not yet demonstrated the consistent ability to be that level of player.

• They still have to deal with their other major restricted free agent, forward Cutter Gauthier, and make improvements to a roster that has done nothing but subtract this offseason and that already had major flaws to it.

Given the context of where the Ducks were coming into this offseason, the salary cap situation they had at their disposal, and the progress they had made in recent years, these are all astonishing developments.

When it comes to the defensive departures I don’t really have a problem with a lot of what happened here. The Ducks were not at all good defensively in 2025-26, so I can’t fault them for not bringing back the people that mostly contributed to that. They shouldn’t have overpaid for Trouba. Nobody needs Radko Gudas for the six-year contract he signed in Florida. Carlson would have been nice to have back, and maybe they were a little premature in moving Zellweger, but they should have still been in a position where they could have done something to upgrade the defense.

Especially with the trade assets they had and accumulated.

I also don’t really fault them for the McTavish trade. I get it. He hadn’t panned out as hoped, and a fresh start was probably best for everybody.

Where Verbeek and the Ducks dropped the ball was with the position they left themselves in with Carlson and Mintyukov, their outdated negotiating practices, and a complete lack of preparation for where the NHL offseason — and the NHL in general — was headed in a rising cap environment with few impact players actually available.

To fully understand the issue here all you need to do is look back at the way Verbeek and the Ducks have handled some of their most recent and most prominent restricted free agent negotiations.

You also need to look at where the NHL has slowly been heading over the past couple of years.

Let’s talk about all of that.