[Emanresu]

Arizona Coyotes

Additions

Niklas Grossman, Boyd Gordon, Antoine Vermette, Zybnek Michalek, Anders Lindbäck, Steve Downie & Dylan Strome

Losses

Sam Gagner, Martin Erat, Mark Visentin, Keith Yandle & Lauri Korpikoski

Preview

Arizona, Arizona, Arizona. Such a young team trying to get up but falling really short. Or at least they did last year. For the upcoming season they’ve made some signings that to me feels to the worse on the short term but might turn into real machina in the long term. 2015 third pick Dylan Strome is an interesting guy but stays with Erie Otters one more year. Max Domi (’13 draft, 12th pick) will be joining the roster this year and he seems like a really good player for the Coyotes. He’s a two-way player, captain for the London Knights and managed 102 points (32G, 70A) over 57 games. Give him a season to adapt himself to the big league and he can be an extremely valuable player for the Coyotes.

Goaltending

Mike Smith had some serious issues during last season. A few times he dipped under .900 SV% which is way below where he should be to help Coyotes get far in the season. Brought in for this season is Anders Lindbäck, who has been team-jumping quite a bit lately. He has some consistency issues which can be seen as his SV% goes like a sine-curve, or so it seems. Last season in Dallas was not awfully good, with .875 and 3.71 GAA, but after he was sent down to AHL and the Texas Stars he found something that really helped him. Posting a .946 1.68GAA for Texas Stars is good, but more impressive is the 16 games he played for the Sabres. Save percentage of .924 and 2.76 GAA, with Sabres, who as we all know, managed to be drop dead last in the standings.

Defense

Oliver Ekman-Larsson, what would the Coyotes do without him? He and Keith Yandle made some magic in an otherwise bland team. For the upcoming year Arizona traded away Keith Yandle to the Rangers and took in Niklas Grossman and Zbynek Michalek to stabilize the defense. I don’t think that these two guys will be able to make up for Yandle and I expect to find Coyotes around the bottom in the GAA table.

Offense

Last season’s offense was miserable, with Ekman-Larsson being the star from the blue line with 23 goals (tying the franchise record for defensemen) and a team-best 43 points. In February Antoine Vermette returned from Blackhawks and he will certainly have a huge amount of expectations on his shoulders. As stated earlier Max Domi will also have his share of expectations upon him, but he’s still young so a bit of tolerance will be given from the fans if this will be a poor season for him. The most impressive (and indirect disappointing) is that the Coyotes had the 7th best power play in the league last season (and the disappointing part is that this didn’t help).

Summary

So, what do I think about the Coyotes chances in this year’s NHL? I think that we will once again find them somewhere around rock bottom. There were very few indications that Mike Smith is going to find his way back to being a top-goalie. He did manage to get some higher percentage towards the end of the season, but I don’t think it’s enough. The offense has to be much better, since they last season were 29th in Goals Per Game and also the defense has to work on just about everything (28th last season with 3.26 GAA).