Aunti Raanta is off for the weekend with an injury. Uncle Wedgewood takes the crease for back-to-back games. That should be enough to guarantee a couple of losses, but the Coyotes actually won last night.
Taking the first of the back-to-backs against the LA Kings by a score of 3-2 is pretty impressive. What's more impressive is that the Coyotes have now won four of five games. Take that haters!
The Coyotes win last night was a full team effort. OEL played great, he's on a four game point streak. Fischer and Dvorak - guys who I said a week ago should probably be in the AHL - had great games, and they finally got a good game from a back up goalie. Not that Wedgewood has been bad (like Domingue and Hill) but that felt like the first game where the team didn't play like they had a bad goalie behind them, if that makes any sense.
For the Coyotes the win moves them to only three points back of the Oilers. It puts them within ten point of a playoff spot. That's still a huge gap, but I don't know, it's fun to dream..
I will say this though: With Strome and Merkley absolutely tearing up the AHL, the Coyotes could call them both up and have two-thirds of a great third line ready to go. No team with Richardson, Reider, Cousins and Rinaldo is ever going anywhere, so some improvement is necessary.
Still, at the end of the day, I'd rather write about how they won and didn't deserve to than about how they lost and deserved to win. The Coyotes are a team on the rise, but they're rising slowly like a fine bread!
Tonight they'll take on the Knights and hopefully not go 0-3 to an expansion team.