Things Already Not Going Well for Coyotes Ahead of 2022-2023 Season

It’s the first week of July, and things are already going poorly for the Arizona Coyotes.

The NHL released its full schedule for the 2022-2023 season on Wednesday, and for the Coyotes, it was a terrible start to the offseason.

We already know that the Yotes will be sharing Arizona State University’s ice surface, which is not ideal. However, it is presumably the reason for the newest uphill battle that Arizona will have to fight.

The Coyotes’ schedule has them slated to be the last of the NHL’s 32 franchises to play a home game. While many teams will play their home openers between October 11-14, Arizona won’t play in front of its home fans until October 28.

The 2022-2023 season is already off to a bad start for the Coyotes.

Arizona’s long wait will come while the team plays its first six contests on the road. The season will begin in Pittsburgh for the Coyotes, and the entire season-opening road trip will be in the Eastern time zone.

After returning home for four games, the schedule deals the Coyotes a blow even larger than the initial six-game stint away from home.

Arizona will play 14 straight games on the road between November 5 and December 7. Yes, that’s right, the Coyotes will spend an entire month away from home. Yikes.

A road trip that long is very similar to the one that the New York Islanders had to play last season. The Isles played the first 13 games of the year on the road, which was a big reason that the team that had made consecutive trips to the Conference Finals round missed the playoffs altogether.

For the Yotes, nothing seems to come easy, and this news on schedule release day is anything but positive for the franchise. Arizona probably will not have playoff aspirations in the first place, but regardless, this does not help.

I imagine that most fans expected the 2022-2023 campaign to be a difficult one for the Coyotes, and unfortunately, the troubles have already begun.