ANAHEIM, Calif. — Trevor Zegras was back in action for the Anaheim Ducks on Tuesday night, taking shifts for the first time in nearly seven weeks. The omnipresent question that follows the playmaking forward is how much longer he will play for them.
For the rest of his season? For the rest of his contract? For the rest of his career? Feel free to take your pick. The only time his future with the Ducks doesn’t get assessed is when he’s injured, which has been too often over the last two seasons.
But the smaller, more pertinent question now is, how much can Zegras help his struggling, goal-challenged club, now that he has made it back from surgery to repair a torn meniscus? On Tuesday, it took less than a minute for him to show that he brings an element to their offense that was missing. It is going to take a lot more for a lot longer to lift a flagging group that’s plummeting toward another draft lottery.
Little changed for the Ducks as they dropped a 5-2 decision to the Florida Panthers. They don’t score nearly enough. They didn’t score at all on their just-completed 1-4-1 road trip, which killed any momentum built from a 4-1-1 stretch with wins against quality teams. That proved to be a mirage.
The Ducks did get back Zegras, and that helps. And perhaps he can use the balance of another lost Ducks season to get his once-wildly promising career back on the road.
Taken as a whole, the 23-year-old had an unspectacular return. He had six shot attempts, four of which reached Sergei Bobrovsky, which tied for the team lead in both. He had three giveaways and zero faceoffs taken in 15 minutes and 48 seconds, and a minus-2 rating at even strength.
But they were snippets when Zegras gave Anaheim the added threat it desperately needs. Take that opening minute. Coach Greg Cronin had Zegras out for the opening puck drop on left wing, with Leo Carlsson in the middle and Alex Killorn on the right. The first play Zegras made was an effective shot toward Bobrovsky that created a rebound for Carlsson to force an extra stop by the goalie.
Later in the first period, the two played off each other coming down the left side of the ice. Carlsson’s rush gave Zegras the space he needed to get a clean look at Bobrovsky. It was easily stopped, but another chance had been created. The two had played together before and their chemistry was reignited. Carlsson was finally given a dangerous winger who could create and Zegras fed off the 20-year-old’s skating. Per Natural Stat Trick, the Zegras-Carlsson pairing was on the ice for 16 chances and seven against. All four true scoring chances created were considered high-danger chances.
“He’s really fast and he plays with his head up and he makes a lot of good decisions,” Zegras said of Carlsson, sporting a mullet-ditched haircut in a nod to changing his luck for 2025. “As the winger and the wall guy, if I can give it to him with a lot of speed and open ice, that’s what I’m a try and do.
“He drives the (defense) back four or five feet over the blue line. If I can give him that puck in the middle of the (ice) and kind of stay with him, he’ll create a ton of space for me and then I can try to create a ton of space for him with maybe a move over the line. Try and get him the puck and go from there.”
On the Ducks’ first power play, the Carlsson line was kept together with youngsters Olen Zellweger and Cutter Gauthier. Zegras worked on the half-wall and had a driving Gauthier to the back post in his sights. The seam pass got through, but Gauthier couldn’t get a stick on it. The power play has been a major problem, another reason why the Ducks can’t reach three goals more consistently. Just five goals in 57 chances were scored in the 22 games Zegras was on the shelf.
The Ducks’ power play did deliver on the night’s opening goal as Ryan Strome, Troy Terry and Frank Vatrano teamed on a nice passing play for Vatrano’s finish. Teams simply don’t respect the Ducks’ ability to make plays under pressure. And while the power play wasn’t torching opponents when Zegras was active before his Dec. 4 knee injury, his presence can at least make penalty kills a little more honest when they get set up.
“I just think he’s got the ability to hang onto the puck,” Strome said of Zegras. “I think he’s a true half-wall guy with how much time he’s spent there over his life, whether it’s in different levels of hockey. His way to set up plays and create offense. Create seams and holes. I think that’s his home there. That’s where he likes to be. He’s had a lot of success there in his young career.
“You get a guy like that back that’s eager and a team that needs some of that, I think hopefully it’s a good mix.”
The first period was Zegras at his best. He found teammates with accurate passes to get the Ducks through the neutral zone smoothly and executed feeds that others just can’t do as often. The connections for scoring chances only figure to increase as he’s back playing every night.
“His IQ offensively is elite,” Cronin said. “He’s higher than anybody we’ve got in terms of seeing plays develop. He’s one of those rare people that, he’s two plays ahead and then, when he goes back to the bench, if you ask him what happened, what he was looking for, he’s seeing it through the eyes of like a video. He’s slowing the game down when he has possession. That’s certainly going to help in the offensive zone. It’s going to help on our rushes. It’s going to help on the power play.
“The big thing for him coming back in is his timing. You can go through all the reps you want in rehab skates, but he’s got to deal with resistance. I don’t care how good you are. There’s a big transition doing that. I think he worked his rear end off. I think he put some weight on. I think he’s got some more strength to his game. He’s going to help us.”
It was hardly a perfect return. Zegras’ defense may never approach Selke Trophy-caliber, and it was he and Carlsson who failed to disrupt Sam Bennett on the opening shift of the third period when Florida took a two-goal lead. There are those who feel Zegras has concentrated so much on being the two-way player Cronin demands that it has impacted his offensive game, and they can point to his low numbers — four goals and 10 points in 25 games — as proof of that narrative. (Seven of those points came in a five-game span just before he got hurt.)
After all, this is still someone who put up consecutive 23-goal seasons, with 61 and 65 points. The first made him the Calder Trophy runner-up to Detroit’s Moritz Seider. But since he signed a three-year bridge deal with a $5.75 million cap hit, Zegras has played in only 56 of a possible 129 games as he’s dealt with a groin issue, a broken ankle and then the torn knee ligament.
When I asked Cronin about choosing to play Zegras on the wing or at center, the coach called it a “dilemma.” He’s got three natural centers in Carlsson, Zegras and Mason McTavish. He’s also struggled to concoct a consistently effective line featuring any of them, as the Vatrano-Strome-Terry trio has been the one he’s leaned on. “I’m just focused on the short-term solution right now and that is to get ‘Z’ in a top-six role,” Cronin said.
Zegras wants to play center. He’s been more effective there in his Ducks career, even with the warts. For now, he’ll be on the wing with Carlsson and we’ll see how long that lasts. Now it’s about trying to get him back to the dynamic talent that made the Ducks more watchable in this mostly dark period that has reached seven seasons. For his sake. For theirs.
“I know when I play with him, it feels like I’m always open,” Strome said. “He can see everybody on the ice. Power play, obviously. I think just his confidence. His aura. I said this last year, I know it wasn’t probably the year he wanted but when he came back in the lineup, there’s just a little bit of an uplift. His personality and his spark and his charisma, I think, does rub off on guys. When you see guys making plays and being confident, I think it does bleed into the group.
“Obviously, he’s got a unique skill set. Something that we can desperately use.”
(Photo of Trevor Zegras: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
