It was a little after 4 p.m. Pacific on Monday afternoon when the hockey world collectively said, 'Wait, what?"
The Ducks and Philadelphia Flyers announced one of the biggest trades of the 2023-24 NHL season yesterday, agreeing to swap defenseman Jamie Drysdale and a 2025 second-round pick for left wing Cutter Gauthier.
One of the most highly touted prospects in the sport, Gauthier just finished a dominant World Junior championship performance, co-leading the tournament in scoring and guiding the United States to a gold medal.
Originally selected fifth overall by Philadelphia in the 2022 NHL Draft, despite Anaheim's best attempts to land him then, Gauthier offers a rare blend of size, skill and speed and joins a young Ducks forward core of Mason McTavish, Leo Carlsson and Trevor Zegras.
"When I look at our system and our organization, we didn't have a player like this in our prospect pool," General Manager Pat Verbeek said last night on Ducks Stream. "There's not a player like this coming. Gauthier is already two years down the line in his development towards being able to come in and play in the NHL.
“Based on some of the players that we have up front, I think he’s going to complement them really well and they’re going to complement him really well.”
Currently a sophomore at Boston College, Gauthier leads the Eagles in goals this season and ranks sixth among NCAA leaders. The 6-3 forward has experience playing both center and wing, serving as the top pivotman for the Americans as they captured gold last week in Sweden. Gauthier was also named the tournament's best forward.
"He has obvious top-six talent,” Verbeek said. “He's versatile. He can really shoot the puck and he's got underrated playmaking skills. His skating ability is elite, in my opinion. I've been looking for more speed up front with our group and certainly fills that ticket.
“What I love about Cutter is he’s a shooter and goal scorer. He has a nice combination of playmaking ability as well, so I think not only will he be able to shoot the puck into the net, but I think he’s going to be able to make other players better too.”
Gauthier is expected to finish his collegiate season before signing with Anaheim this spring.
Going the other way is a beloved figure both in the Ducks locker room and fanbase in Drysdale, a 21-year-old defenseman with 123 games of NHL experience.
"Obviously, it was a difficult decision to trade Drysdale," Verbeek said. "He's an up-and-coming young defenseman, but when I've been watching our team over the last month or so, we've had difficult scoring goals...I want to thank Jamie for his hard work and dedication to the organization. He's got a great future ahead of him."
For Verbeek, the deal was less about trying to move Drysdale or shake up the locker room, and more about solving the goal-scoring issue Anaheim faces now and in the future.
“It was difficult in trying to do this thing," Verbeek admitted. "I had to look at our overall group and based on all the 18 one-goal games that we’ve lost this year, I wanted to give the group someone that can help us get over the hump in a natural scoring situation.”
Verbeek also acknowledged that Anaheim's stockpile of defense prospects, headlined by rookies Pavel Mintyukov and Tristan Luneau, made the move more palatable midseason.
“That was a big part of it,” Verbeek said. “Tristan and the short amount of games that he got to play at our level, just watching him progress, watching him get stronger, watching him improve almost exponentially on a game-by-game basis allowed us to be able to make this trade.
“It’s going to be an open spot, so it’s going to present opportunities for some of our young defensemen in the organization to fight for job. The good thing is we have a lot of depth on defense and that allowed us to make this trade where we could help our forward group as well.”
