Follow @james_tanner123 The Coyotes have assigned Anthony DeAngelo, Brandan Perlini and Laurent Dauphin to the AHL.
However, before we complain too much about this move, the Coyotes are on a five game break and may just want to get these guys into some games over the coming week.
Hopefully that is the case, especially for Perlini and DeAngelo. Perlini isn't exactly tearing up the league in his limited role but he is fun to watch and has a ton of talent.
DeAngelo has been excellent, however. Despite the typical attempts by hockey talking-heads to link his recent suspension to a couple of suspensions he had when he was a teenager, in order to create a ridiculous and unfair narrative that he is some how a 'bad guy' or whatever, DeAngelo has been a solid player for the Coyotes.
The guy is on a 36 point pace, having scored nine points in 20 games.
Just a reminder, but 40 points for a defenseman is an elite amount of offensive production. Last season, out of 250 or so total defensmen, only 25 hit 40 points. Less than one per team. Not sure if we're considering points to be an advanced stat these days, but DeAngelo is rocking his Coyotes debut.
DeAngelo has a Corsi Rating positive in relation to his team, and he makes the Coyotes a much better team than they are without him in the lineup, and that isn't up for debate. Sure, he makes the occasional blunder expected of a young defenseman, but it's remarkable for a rookie defenseman to put up a nearly 40 point pace.
For all I know, DeAngelo might be a complete jerk. Maybe he is a bad guy. But I don't like it when people saddle a young kid with a reputation when it's hard enough to make it on it's own. Until he actually does something illegal, or he is accused of an actual crime, I find it preposterous that people have to mention in every story what a bad guy he might be.
Despite all this, god-forbid someone try to break into the league while guilty of being an idiot. Because that's all you can say about DeAngelo - that at worst, he seems like a bit of an idiot. He might be a bit immature.
But in a the league / media that covers the league that acts as if any deviation from a choir-boy mentality (most likely a sub-conscience desire to re-frame a game in which players are routinely not penalized for cross-checking an opponent in the neck, and which guys who couldn't otherwise make the league are rostered in order to beat people up) DeAngelo is written about as if he were the hockey equivalent of O.J Simpson.
You can learn to be easier to get along with and become less temperamental. Let's at least stop punishing the guy for running afoul of a politically correct society until he does something that actually worse than 90% of the rest of the people who just don't get caught doing or saying something crappy.
I don't want to excuse an abuse of the official call, but it takes a lot of competitive fire to make the NHL and some guys have trouble going all-in and pulling back in time to avoid crossing the line. It doesn't make it excusable to ignore a ref or get suspended for abuse of an official, but it's also a suspension that almost every guy in the NHL could potentially get.
There is no cause to link this to prior "behavior."
It's unfair sometimes what we demand of these kids, especially when they basically have to drop out of high-school and grow up in at least a semi-public way.
I am not arguing for entitlement, nor am I excusing the abuse of an official. I'm just saying that we should deal with that call alone and not link it to some things he did while in the minors in order to create a narrative that is easy and lazy for a writer but one that is unfair to the player.
I mean, look who the president is. And he's 70 by the way, not some entitled millennial.
If Trump can mock a disabled guy on camera and still be the President, then Anthony DeAngelo can be forgiven for saying something homophobic or racist when he was too young to drink. We hope he learned from it. But what connection that has to his recent suspension, I will never know.