The Arizona Coyotes Need Lots to Go Right to Reach Playoffs
The Arizona Coyotes are facing an uphill battle to get to the postseason, and they’ll need help from their NHL brethren to get there.
The most critical stretch of games of the season begins tomorrow night for the Arizona Coyotes (67 games and 72 points) with a visit to Canada to face the Vancouver Canucks (65 games and 74 points). The Canucks sit precariously in the top wild card position, having lost their past three games and ultimately being leapfrogged by the Calgary Flames (67 games and 75 points). The Flames are in fact who the Coyotes play next Friday after the game in Vancouver.
The final game in this brief Canadian road trip occurs against the Winnipeg Jets ( 67 games and 72 points), who host the Buffalo Sabres tonight, on Monday evening.
At the beginning of the movie “The Patriot,” released in 2000 and starring Mel Gibson, Gibson utters the line “I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me.” I thought of that line as being apropos while thinking about the Coyotes’ formidable situation and their task at hand. Perhaps their past has caught up with them and, like often chasing games throughout the season, they’re chasing teams ahead of them in the standings now, and won’t be able to reach the playoffs without “outside” help.
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When you lose games early in the season, it seems easy to dismiss a poor performance as a one-off, an aberration, rather than a sign of something wrong with the team. There isn’t enough time to see patterns emerge or to identify inconsistencies in systems or combinations of players yet. With a sample size of 67 games, however, and hopefully learning from your past successes and failures, there should be no surprises.
Has it ever entered the minds of the Coyotes’ faithful that maybe the team is just not good enough to forge ahead and battle through to the playoffs?
With the ‘Yotes, is what we saw during the season what we’re about to see in the next 15 games? It’s hard to tell when the season’s common denominator has been inconsistent play throughout the year. Regardless, the performance of the team is only one factor, and how the opposition fares may doom the Desert Dogs to their couches during the postseason.
We’ll have to wait and see if the Coyotes’ collective performances will be consistent enough (in a good way) to effectively challenge for a wild card spot right up until the end. I hope so.
I’m excited to see how it all pans out starting tomorrow night in Vancouver. Let’s go Coyotes!