The NHL off-season is in full swing, giving us the perfect opportunity to look at each team’s prospect pools. Any player who no longer holds rookie eligibility in the NHL is considered graduated and no longer considered a prospect for the purposes of these exercises.
In this series, Tony Ferrari will dig into each team’s strengths and weaknesses, a quick overview of their latest draft class, where each team’s positional depth chart stands, and who could be next in line for an NHL roster spot.
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The Arizona Coyotes went into the draft with a glut of draft capital and used it to bolster their prospect pool and strengthen their biggest weakness coming into the draft – the center position. This team is about a decade into its rebuild with some unstable ownership and management thrown into the mix along the way. Unfortunately, that means that they have had some misses and odd decisions along the way. Thankfully, they seem to be on the right path now.
The Coyotes have a couple of young players on the roster in Barrett Hayton up front and Janis Jérôme Moser on the back end, but they have a lot of journeymen-type players as well. This could be a good thing for many of the team’s top prospects because NHL clubs are a bit more inclined to displace a journeyman for a young player than they would be if there were a large group of legacy players to the franchise.
The Coyotes are at an interesting phase in their rebuild. They likely aren’t good enough to take the next step towards competing so they have to choose whether the NHL experience for players such as Victor Söderström and Dylan Guenther is going to be good for their development or risk of overwhelming them and stunting their growth. This could be a year of allowing the youth to sink or swim or they could opt to allow their youth to develop one more year at the junior or AHL levels and ride the journeymen players through their first season at Arizona State University.
Regardless of what they choose regarding roster construction for the upcoming season, the Yotes are very much in the Connor Bedard sweepstakes. Adding one of the top-end talents from the loaded 2023 draft would make this somewhat underwhelming prospect pool look much better.
2022 NHL Draft Class
Round 1 (3 Overall) – Logan Cooley, C, U.S. National Development Team [USHL] Round 1 (11 Overall) – Conor Geekie, C, Winnipeg Ice [WHL]
Round 1 (29 Overall) – Maveric Lamoureux, D, Drummondville Voltigeurs [QMJHL]…
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