NHL Power Rankings: Highs and Lows, and the Coyotes’ are going streaking

Schmooze of the Week: Arizona Coyotes

The Arizona Coyotes have officially entered Wagon mode. The Yotes have gone from the bottom of the mess they call the Western Conference Wild Card race to actually having a buffer over Minnesota for that second spot. How did this happen?

Let’s start in net, where many playoff contenders are strong. Darcy Kuemper has lost just two starts in regulation in the last month. One game against the Ducks where he stopped 28 out of 31, and a clunker against Chicago this week where the Blackhawks ran roughshod all over the Coyotes defense.

His record is 19-4-4 since the calendar turned to 2019, and has a save percentage of .928, compared to 5-12-2 with a .909 save percentage in the 2018 portion of this season. The Coyotes started 2019 as the sixth worst team in the league in the standings, now they’re in a playoff spot just 2.5 months later.

Looking back at Kuemper’s career, his numbers with Minnesota aren’t bad, and he was good in his small sample size in Los Angeles. His first few months in Arizona weren’t amazing, but suddenly something clicked and he became a brick wall.

This is a good thing, because there’s really nothing else impressive on this team right now. Their second leading scorer is a defenseman (Oliver Ekman-Larsson), no one has more than 50 points (fun fact, Nikita Kucherov almost has as many points as the top three Coyotes forwards combined), and more of their key players are minus on the plus/minus scale.

On top of that, the Coyotes are in the bottom third of the league in terms of Corsi% (shot attempts for versus against), yet they’re in the top third of the league in PDO (shooting percentage plus save percentage), meaning they’re getting more luck and less control of game play.

In fact, most of their games in this mad dash of Kuemper see the attempts in favor of the opponent, sometimes heavily, even in victory. Take their February 28th game against Vancouver, a 5-2 Coyotes win, but Vancouver out attempted Arizona 79-50. January 20th against Toronto? 4-2 final score for the Yotes, but attempts 75-51 for the Leafs. In the March 12th win against the Blues, the Coyotes won 3-1, but the Blues out-attempted the Yotes 76-34! More than DOUBLE the attempts.

These may just be the extreme examples, but more often than not, the Corsi has been favoring the Coyotes’ opponents. However, if your goalie is stopping 93% of those attempts that are actually on the net, it certainly helps.

So, the Coyotes are in the playoff race mostly because Darcy Kuemper has thrown the team on his back. There are other external factors as well. The two teams who are immediately behind the Coyotes for that second Wild Card spot are the Minnesota Wild and Colorado Avalanche.

Minnesota has been mediocre, made a couple of trades that aren’t looking too good (hello, Nino Niederreiter), and have lost their two-way rock Mikko Koivu for the season. Devan Dubnyk has been very streaky, and as he has been going, so have the Wild. With just a handful of games left to go, and now with points to claw back from the Coyotes, they can’t afford any gnarly streaks from Dubnyk.

The Avalanche have a much simpler problem. Their offense is incredibly top-heavy, with only Mikko Rantanen, Nathan Mackinnon, and Gabriel Landeskog scoring more than 50 points, and Landeskog is out for what looks like the remainder of the season. The rest of the offense has to step up and start putting away the chances they have, which has been something of a problem all year. If the top line isn’t scoring, no one is, and it doesn’t matter how the goaltending goes (which hasn’t been great also).

So, as it stands now with three weeks left in the season, the Arizona Coyotes should sneak into the playoffs…only to get annihilated by San Jose or Calgary. Worth it? Worth it. You know what, I’ll call it here now. Coyotes to upset the Pacific winner in the first round, for the sake of anarchy. Who’s with me?