The Anaheim Ducks have not advanced past the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2017. They have not been favored in a postseason series since 2018. They entered Round 1 against the Edmonton Oilers as the lower seed against a team that had reached three consecutive Western Conference Finals. They left it as the team that ended Edmonton's three-year run in six games - and they did it with a 21-year-old Swedish center playing the most demanding minutes of his life.
Leo Carlsson's regular season was already a breakthrough: 67 points (29 goals, 38 assists) in 76 games, third on the team behind Cutter Gauthier and Mason McTavish. The playoffs were the part nobody had seen yet. Across six games against the Oilers, Carlsson centered Anaheim's matchup line against Connor McDavid, finished with multiple multi-point performances, and gave Joel Quenneville the only thing the Ducks have lacked for half a decade - a center who can take a defensive-zone draw against the best player in the world and survive the shift.
McDavid finished the series with three goals and seven points across six games - the kind of line that, for any other player in the league, would be elite. For McDavid it was below his standard. Anaheim's defensive plan was not to stop him - that has not been done in a playoff series since 2017. The plan was to make every shift expensive. Carlsson was the player at the center of it.
When the Ducks had last change at home in Games 3, 4 and 6, Quenneville matched Carlsson's line - typically with Frank Vatrano and Troy Terry as wingers and with Pavel Mintyukov and Jackson LaCombe behind them - against McDavid's line for the majority of even-strength minutes. Carlsson took 71 faceoffs in the series and won 41 of them (57.7%). That number, against a Edmonton center group built around McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, is the entire reason Anaheim did not bleed defensive-zone starts across the series.
Why 57.7% Mattered More Than the Goal Totals
Anaheim took 38 defensive-zone faceoffs across the series. They won 24 of them. Carlsson personally won 18 of his 28 defensive-zone draws against Edmonton, including a critical late-third-period sequence in Game 4 that led directly to the Ducks' overtime winner.
For a 21-year-old center taking that volume of defensive-zone work against the best center group in the conference, that win rate is not a stat. It is the entire reason the Oilers did not generate the early-shift looks that have defined their playoff offense for three years. McDavid's line started 61% of its shifts in the neutral or defensive zone in this series. That is what Carlsson's faceoff work bought the rest of the Ducks structure.
Carlsson scored twice and added two assists across his three full series games before the Ducks' depth scoring took over in Games 5 and 6. The first goal, in Game 2, was a wrist shot from the right circle off a McTavish feed that beat Stuart Skinner clean glove side. The second, in Game 4, was the overtime winner - a redirection of a Mintyukov point shot that Carlsson tipped past Skinner from in front of the crease, ending a game in which the Ducks had been outshot 31-22 and Edmonton had carried play for the entire third period.
Game 4 was the turning point of the series. Anaheim went up 3-1. Edmonton, for the first time in three years, was looking at a 3-1 hole in a series. The shot they could not get back was the redirection from the kid who, eighteen months ago, was a teenager being eased into NHL minutes. Quenneville's post-game line: "He's not a project anymore. He's the guy."
The Ducks are now in the second round of the playoffs for the first time in eight years. Their second-round opponent will be the winner of the LA Kings vs Vegas Golden Knights series - either way, an opponent with significantly more recent playoff experience than Anaheim. The Ducks will not be favored. They will be the younger team. They will be the team without postseason scar tissue.
But they will also be the team with Lukas Dostal, who outplayed Skinner across the six games and who finished with a .932 series save percentage. They will be the team with Gauthier (5G in the series), McTavish (8 points), and Carlsson centering the matchup line. They will be the team with the deepest defense corps they have produced since the Lindholm-Fowler-Vatanen era, anchored by LaCombe and Mintyukov - both 23 or younger.
| Center | GP | G | A | +/- | FO% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leo Carlsson (ANA) | 3 | 2 | 2 | +2 | 57.7 |
| Connor McDavid (EDM) | 6 | 3 | 4 | -1 | 46.2 |
| Leon Draisaitl (EDM) | 6 | 2 | 3 | -1 | 55.4 |
| Mason McTavish (ANA) | 6 | 3 | 5 | +3 | 52.1 |
Carlsson was the second overall pick in 2023 behind only Connor Bedard. The early career arc was always going to be slower than Bedard's because of how Anaheim used him - careful minutes, sheltered deployment, a long runway - and because of his role. Centers take longer to develop than wingers. Defensive responsibility takes longer than offensive responsibility. Faceoff acumen, in particular, takes years.
This series compressed that timeline. Anaheim asked Carlsson to take faceoffs against McDavid and Draisaitl, defend in his own zone against the league's best transition team, and produce offensively when the matchups went his way. He did all three. The Ducks did not survive the series despite Carlsson's role. They survived the series because of it.
The Ducks have not been a serious second-round team in a decade. They are now. And the central piece of that turn - the player who makes the defensive structure functional and the offensive structure dangerous in the same shift - is 21 years old, locked into his entry-level contract through next season, and arguably already the team's most important forward.
McDavid, after Game 6, kept his comments brief. "They were better than us. They had more answers than we did." The player who provided most of those answers - particularly in the defensive end where Edmonton has historically lived - was the kid wearing No. 91.
The conversation about Carlsson's ceiling has, until this series, been theoretical. After this series, it isn't.
#91 · C · 82 GP