After 12 seasons in the National Hockey League, Patrick Eaves had the best year of his career in 2016-17 playing for both the Dallas Stars and the Anaheim Ducks.
His 59 games played with the Stars made him a hot commodity at the trade deadline and the Ducks were able to snatch him up for a conditional draft pick. With Dallas, Eaves had already put up career-high scoring numbers, recording 21 goals and 16 assists. His hot season continued with Anaheim as he added 11 more goals to his season total in just 20 games.
When you have a 32 goal season in a contract year like Eaves did, you can expect to reap the rewards of your hard work in the offseason. That indeed happened when the Ducks locked up the winger for three more seasons for $9.45 million. After committing to the veteran for the next three years, Anaheim truly hopes that Eaves can continue to score at the pace he did last season.
Unfortunately, all the signs point to last season being a bit of a fluke. Yes, some players hit their stride a little later in their career. However, Eaves has only scored over 20 goals one other time in his 624 game career and that was in his rookie season back in 2005-06.
When he has had the opportunity to play more than 50 games in a season, Eaves has proven to be a 10 to 15 goals type of producer on the ice. Now, he has only been able to come close to playing a number of games he did last season one other time in his career and that was back when he was with the Carolina Hurricanes for the 2008-09 season. So there is a chance that we just haven't gotten the opportunity to see this kind of scoring from Eaves because his playing time has been limited. However, I find myself taking more of a pessimistic approach.
There is no doubt that Patrick Eaves will play a role in how successful the 2017-18 season is for the Anaheim Ducks. When you commit to a player for three more years, you hope that that player's role will be quite significant. Unfortunately, in terms of goal scoring, we should expect Eaves to come back to reality produce closer to 15 goals instead of 30.