PHOENIX – The Arizona Coyotes have been rebuilding for the last three seasons. In fact, they have been rebuilding since the first season they became known as the Arizona Coyotes, Their rebuild got a reboot this Summer, starting from the top down.
Rebuild 2.0 began when majority owner Andrew Barroway bought out Anthony LeBlanc 
and George Gosbee to become the sole owner of the team. Once LeBlanc and Gary Drummond stepped down as CEO and President of Hockey Operations, respectively, GM John Chayka was left as the lone member of the day-to-day management team.
Chayka quickly made his mark, trading starting Goalie Mike Smith to the Calgary Flames. Before the dust had settled on that deal, news broke that Shane Doan had been informed that the team was not planning to renew his contract. Then Chayka wrapped up his whirlwind week by “parting ways” with Head Coach Dave Tippett.
With Tippett gone, the Coyotes hired former Penguins Assistant Coach Rick Tocchet to be their new bench boss. Tocchet has some history in the Valley. He played for the Phoenix Coyotes for three seasons in the late ’90s. He then returned in 2005 as an Assistant Coach on Wayne Gretzky’s staff. After a brief stint as the Head Coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning, he joined the Penguins as an Assistant in 2014 and was instrumental to their last two Stanley Cup championships.
On the surface, Tocchet’s coaching philosophy doesn’t seem very different from Tippett’s. Both men preach a hard-working, fast-skating, physical style of Hockey that focuses on their own end first, then transitions to offense. What remains to be seen will be how successful Tocchet is at getting the Coyotes’ younger players to commit to the system consistently. Under Tippett their problems stemmed from lapses in commitment, sometimes only momentary, that allowed games to slip away from them.
The Coyotes next tapped Steve Patterson as the team’s new President and CEO. He brings with him a wealth of experience, having served as the Athletic Director for both ASU and University of Texas. He was also the GM of the Houston Aeros (IHL) from 1993-97. His primary focus will likely be on the team’s efforts to relocate to a new facility either downtown or in the near East Valley.
This purge signaled a commitment by the team to their young prospects, at the expense of any semblance of veteran leadership. Now Oliver Ekman-Larsson stands as the last remaining player or coach from the Coyotes’ last playoff team in 2011-12. While the Coyotes have a strong foundation of good, young talent on which to build, the moves left the Coyotes with several pressing needs.
First, and perhaps most obvious, is goaltending. Mike Smith was the clear #1 starter for the Coyotes for the last six seasons. While Louis Domingue showed some promise in a fill-in role last season, there doesn’t seem to be much confidence in him as a regular starter.
Second, the Coyotes have been searching for a legitimate #1 Center for some time now. This has been noted as an organizational need that somehow never really was addressed.
The Coyotes attempted to fill both of those needs by trading for Goalie Antti Raanta and Center Derek Stepan from the New York Rangers.
Raanta has been a more than capable backup to the great Henrik Lundqvist in New York for the past two seasons, but has yet to play a full season as a starter. His numbers are quite impressive, but he’s never played more than 29 games in an NHL season. The one big question mark will be his endurance. Can he handle the extra work? Time will tell. If he can, he could prove to be a more than adequate replacement for Smith, who many Coyotes fans will remember more for his few bad performances in big games than for his many great performances.
Stepan is unquestionably an upgrade at the Center position. He is far and away the best natural center the Coyotes have had in several seasons. He represents a quantum leap at the position, one that the team has coveted for quite some time. Moreover, he has stepped in seamlessly and established himself as one of the leaders on the team. In the absence of their long-time Captain, Shane Doan (and not having a suitable replacement), the Coyotes will need several players to step up and lead this team. Stepan seems willing and able to help fill that need.
Another big need for the Coyotes is good, experienced Defense. They thought they had addressed that need last season with the acquisition of Alex Goligoski, but the team still ended up surrendering the third most goals in the league with the second worst goal differential last season.
The Coyotes sought to improve those numbers by acquiring Defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson from the Chicago Blackhawks. They sacrificed young Defenseman Connor Murphy and Center Laurent Dauphin, but acquired not only a top-notch defensive Defenseman, but also a 3-time Stanley Cup champion. This is a man who knows how to play winning, defensive Hockey.
The one major area that the Coyotes failed to address significantly was goal-scoring. Having once again allowed their one legitimate, consistent scoring threat, Radim Vrbata, to skate off into free agency (signing with the Florida Panthers), the Coyotes once again failed to find a replacement for him.
They will rely heavily on the improvement of younger players such as Max Domi, who hopes to regain his rookie form after a disappointing sophomore season. Another young star who needs a big bounce-back year is Anthony Duclair, whose performance dipped so badly last year that he was demoted to the team’s AHL affiliate in Tucson and still struggled even at that level.
Some bright spots from last season include Center Christian Dvorak, who was the only regular player to finish the season with a positive +/- rating, and Winger Tobias Rieder, who was steady all season with flashes of brilliance. These two could pace the offense along with Clayton Keller and Christian Fischer, who showed promise in brief appearances with the club last season.
All in all, the Coyotes will rely heavily on defense and goaltending, because it seems unlikely that they will score many goals. Their focus will have to be on goal prevention, with opportunistic scoring to give them a chance to win games. They will need to be hard-working and disciplined and rely heavily on their speed to create chances.
The team’s success will lean on Tocchet’s ability to motivate his team to play within the system. He has a fearsome reputation, but is also known as a player’s coach. Fear may be his biggest motivating factor, be it fear of disappointing him or possibly fear of his wrath. In any case, his team will need to stick to the game plan. There will be little room for error.
Another x-factor that may be a key to the team’s success this season will be leadership. In the absence of Shane Doan, the only Captain most in the organization have ever known, there has been much speculation as to who would wear the ‘C’ for the Coyotes this year. For most of the Summer, rumors around the Valley had Oliver Ekman-Larsson penciled in as the new Captain. Many felt he was the only logical choice, as the longest-tenured member of the team.
Tocchet has decided on a different approach. It’s tough for a new Coach, with lots of new players, to determine who will be the one Captain of the team. Tocchet has decided to have a 5-man leadership committee, of sorts. There will be two permanent Alternate Captains, Ekman-Larsson and Hjalmarsson, and three others (Stepan, Goligoski, and Brad Richardson) who will “share” the third ‘A’ on a rotating basis.
The wording of the announcement would seem to indicate that this is not necessarily a permanent situation. If one of these players demonstrates exceptional leadership, he may be awarded the Captain’s ‘C’ at a later time, but this will be their leadership structure to begin the season.
This could prove to be a very wise decision for one important reason. Whoever was chosen to wear the ‘C’ in the aftermath of the Shane Doan era would be held to an almost impossibly high standard. It would have been a tremendous amount of pressure on Ekman-Larsson or anybody else. It wouldn’t have been fair. This way allows some time for people to get used to the idea of a leader other than Doan. The next Coyote to wear the ‘C’ will have had the opportunity to prove himself the true leader of the team.
The Arizona Coyotes will begin the season with a lot of new faces, and hopefully this will result in a new direction for the team. If nothing else, Andrew Barroway has demonstrated a commitment to the team here in the Valley. If he was just looking to flip the team, as some have speculated, he could have done it a lot cheaper. The turnaround may not happen this year, but the new additions are definitely a step in the right direction.
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