Arizona Coyotes receive a negative offseason review
Jul 13, 2015, 3:44 PM | Updated: Jul 16, 2015, 2:51 pm
The Hockey News broke down the winners and losers of the 2015 NHL offseason on Monday. While many publications such as the USA Today and Yahoo gave the Coyotes a positive review, the same can not be said from this opinion.
It’s hard to give a losing grade to a team that’s clearly rebuilding, but when you look at what Arizona has done this offseason, it’s hard to justify. The Coyotes added eight new bodies to the lineup and between them they stand to lose 1.75 wins (though much of that is from Lindback and Scott alone), which isn’t so bad until you realize that those eight players cost almost $18 million. The four players they cut come in at $8.5 million and are another 0.22 wins lost. That’s almost $10 million extra spent on two lost wins, which is impressively bad.
The Coyotes had $18 million they had to use to reach the salary cap floor, and were able to bring back familiar faces in Antoine Vermette, Boyd Gordon and Zbynek Michalek.
In addition, the team brought in veterans such as Brad Richardson, Steve Downie, Nicklas Grossman and John Scott to stabilize the depth of the bottom lines and bring in strong veteran leadership to help guide the heaps of young talent that will start showing up on the roster this upcoming season.
Max Domi and Anthony Duclair are two of those talents expected to make an impact on next years team, which is why General Manager Don Maloney put his focus on building his team’s depth and bringing in strong leadership.
Domi and Duclair, along with Christian Dvorak, Brendan Perlini and Dylan Strome, make up the core of the Coyotes future and could be the difference in this team competing for a playoff spot next year.
