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Coyotes Lose, Tocchet Confounds

December 11, 2017, 5:49 PM ET [46 Comments]
James Tanner
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The Coyotes record is a shame, because if was closer to being not terrible, you could take a game like last night's game against the Blackhawks and find some real positives.

Instead, the Coyotes dropped their fourth in a row and you're left with nothing to say, really, other than Patrick Kane is pretty awesome at hockey.

The Coyotes are now 7-21-5 and the next worst team has three games in hand and one more point. It's a disaster in every way.

There are some reasonable excuses: injuries, the schedule, the turnover from last season, etc.

But my main takeaway from last night's game is just confusion. The Coyotes have a great stable of young talent, so I don't really care if they have a bad year: it's just another high-end draft pick and another year of growth for their young players. The young talent is exciting and there's really no problems other than the short-term annoyance of the team being eliminated from playoff contention by the end of October.



Since the team is out of the playoffs, I don't see why they don't just focus on getting a lot of ice time for the players who the team will be built around.

For instance: You have a guy who can do this on your team, and you play him just 12 minutes a night:



You're eliminated from the playoffs, so why not just give Perlini some real top-six minutes and let him try to do that more often. Instead, last night, Tobias Rieder, Brad Richardson and Jordan Martinook all played more than Perlini, and Zack Rinaldo played just as much.

Same with Dylan Strome.

It's not like they're playing so well they are demanding more ice time, but they are players who, for their entire lives, have gotten 20 minutes or so per game as the best player on every team they've been on. They are the future of your team. And it's not like you can get any worse. Playing them as the least used players on the roster might make it harder for them to get going and may have the opposite of the intended effect (which I assume is to make them 'earn it').

If you've got a good team, break the rookies in slowly, by all means. But if you've got a team that's already out of contention, then why not give ice time to your future stars to help their development.

At this point, there's nothing to lose.
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