What Your Team Is Thankful For: Arizona Coyotes

As Thanksgiving and the holiday season approaches, PHR will be taking a look at what teams are thankful for in 2022-23. There also might be a few things your team would like down the road. We’ll examine what’s gone well in the early going and what could improve as the season rolls on for the Arizona Coyotes.

Who are the Coyotes thankful for?

Clayton Keller.

There was a time in which Clayton Keller looked more like a quality top-six player than a truly elite talent. Like someone on the bubble of first-line talent level, but without the production to back up that assessment. Those days are over. Despite suffering a gruesome lower-body injury that prematurely ended his season last year, Clayton Keller has picked up right where he left off and is cementing himself as a true face-of-the-franchise offensive talent.

Last season was a breakout of sorts for Keller. While he scored 65 points in 2017-18 as a rookie, he struggled to reach those heights in subsequent years, finishing in the 40-point range for the next two seasons and then scoring at a 51-point pace in the shortened 2020-21 season. In 2021-22, Keller reached another dimension of production, scoring 63 points, leading the Coyotes in point production despite playing in just 67 games.

This year, Keller has 17 points in 15 games and looks every bit like the elite offensive play driver he was last year. Still just 24 years old, Keller has put himself in a position to be the centerpiece of the Coyotes’ forward corps for many years to come.

Back in 2019, Keller signed an eight-year, $7.15MM AAV extension. While it was a deal that some at the time viewed as an overpayment, it now looks to be an extremely shrewd investment, seeing as the going rate for point-per-game offensive play drivers is $8MM AAV or higher.

For a franchise that has dealt with so much uncertainty over the past few years, having Keller productive and locked into a team-friendly long-term extension is the sort of thing any Arizona fan should be extremely thankful for.

What are the Coyotes thankful for?

The 2023 Draft.

As was mentioned in the first edition of our Big Hype Prospects series, the 2023 draft class at the moment looks absolutely loaded with quality talent. That sentiment is especially true at the top of the draft, since there are four players whose current prospect profiles compare quite favorably to the first-overall picks from the 2021 and 2022 drafts.

Connor Bedard needs no introduction for most hockey fans, while…