Arizona Coyotes 2023-24 season preview: Playoff chances, projected points, roster rankings

Publish date: 2024-05-18

By Sean Gentille, Shayna Goldman, and Dom Luszczyszyn

Make no mistake, the Arizona Coyotes aren’t ready to be a good team yet. But it does feel like they’re finally ready to not be a bad team.

Arizona has finished in the league’s bottom 10 in eight of the last nine seasons and chances are the Coyotes will land there again this season. Progress is on the horizon though. Their young core is growing, they’ve added depth during the offseason and most importantly there’s the impending debut of one of the league’s best prospects.

It might not be enough to make the playoffs, but for the first time in a long time, the Coyotes look like they might be actually relevant. Arizona looks poised to surprise.

The projection

Yeah, we were shocked too.

A 13-point jump back toward relevancy feels like a league-sanctioned hoax to get people excited about the Coyotes again. We promise it’s not. Arizona got a lot better this summer and it shows with an incredibly rosy forecast. The growing excitement in the desert is earned.

Oddsmakers aren’t nearly as convinced about Arizona’s potential to improve to this degree in 2023-24 though. Most are pegging the Coyotes as a 74-to-75-point team. As the second youngest team it all depends on how much the players actually grow from last season and The Model is pretty bullish in that regard.

That probably doesn’t mean Arizona is making the playoffs, at 14 percent it’s still very much unlikely. But it’s not exactly a pipe dream either. For a young team on the rise, this could legitimately be a stepping-stone season, one where the Coyotes exile themselves from the league’s bottom 10 for good.

It’s still more likely than not that Arizona finishes there, but a 35 percent chance of landing in the league’s mushy middle (or higher) is something this franchise will gladly take. After a decade of ineptitude Coyotes fans deserve a win. This season looks like it can be one — it’s up to the Coyotes to actually live up to the promise. For once.

Percentiles with the bar graphs are based on each player’s Offensive, Defensive and Net Rating relative to their time-on-ice slot, i.e. the first forward is compared to other first forwards only.

The strengths

A year ago, this section would’ve been … sparse, let’s say. Challenging. We’d have talked about Clayton Keller coming back at full strength for another run at the All-Star Game. Nick Schmaltz was trying to follow up a breakout season that paired gaudy point totals with some under-the-hood concerns. Jakob Chychrun was, for the time being, still around.

Other than that, there wasn’t much to offer in the way of positivity. Arizona’s 62-point projection was the lowest in the history of the model by eight full points, swiping the title from the 2021-22 Sabres. The core was flawed, perhaps fatally. The support was the NHL’s worst.

Now, did the Coyotes overcome all of that? Nope. They were still a bad team. But they were garden-variety bad, not “burn the tape” bad, and there were legitimate reasons for on-ice optimism. Now, after an offseason spent adding legit NHL players up and down the lineup, there are even more.

We’ll start with Keller, who bounced back from a broken leg late in the 2020-21 to continue his ascendence to a reliably high-end, top-line performer. He had 86 points in 82 games, producing enough points and offensive impact to counterbalance some iffy defensive play. Keller is 34th in five-on-five points per 60 over the last two seasons, right behind Sidney Crosby, and still only 25 years old.

Schmaltz, meanwhile, weathered some expected regression to his individual and on-ice shooting percentages and put together another strong season as a running mate with Keller. His 2.42 points/60 at five-on-five were more than Leon Draisaitl, Tim Stützle and Aleksander Barkov. When those two were on the ice together at five-on-five, Arizona scored 3.26 goals/60 — which is good. For context, Ottawa was at 3.25 with Stützle and Claude Giroux on the ice.

The difference this season, aside from the fact that both Keller and Schmaltz added their own resumes, is that Arizona — after a few years of blatant tanking added talent but didn’t quite land Connor Bedard — is once again acting like a team that wants to win hockey games.

Jason Zucker is a great example of that in action. One of the better forwards in a weak class of free agents, Zucker signed with Arizona — somewhat surprisingly — for one year and $5.3 million. The deal, though, makes sense. Zucker gets a decent chunk of change, guaranteed middle-six minutes and a better shot at consistent power-play minutes, where he’d have an opportunity to juice up his point totals. Zucker scored 2.06 points/60 at five-on-five with Pittsburgh last season, a solid number overall and third-best on that team, second only to Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. Zucker spent most of his season on Malkin’s wing and took advantage, leading the Penguins in goals/60. He’ll bring skating, a balanced offensive game and solid production to a line, though he won’t be playing with anyone of Malkin’s caliber.

Zucker might make sense on a line with Matias Maccelli, a playmaking winger who pushed himself into the Calder discussion with a 49-point rookie season, including 30 five-on-five points, in 60 games. He led the Coyotes in with 12.47 primary shot assists/60, according to Corey Sznjader’s tracking data. That’s a tick better than Jonathan Huberdeau in 2022-23.

The biggest on-ice variable for the Coyotes, perhaps this season and certainly down the line, will be the development of Logan Cooley, who pulled a late 180 — thanks in part to Keller’s persuasion — and opted not to play a second season at Minnesota.

A follow-up to his freshman year would’ve been tough; Cooley, the No. 3 pick in 2022, had 60 points in 38 NCAA games, behind only Adam Fantilli, the third overall pick in June, in the men’s D-I scoring race. Thanks in part to that production, Cooley is projected to be a legitimate offensive contributor this season. Whether he’s an overall plus for Arizona this season remains to be seen and depends, in part, on his linemates — but his presence is undeniably a good thing. The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler has Cooley as the No. 6 drafted prospect; Corey Pronman believes he’s got “bubble All-Star” potential. Both rave about his skating and hockey IQ. Most importantly for Arizona, the West Mifflin, Pa., native is a center to his core — and he’s likely to be a good one.

Alex Kerfoot is Arizona’s other new, name-brand forward. He should add something particularly novel to the Coyotes’ middle six: defensive value. A weak offensive game put him under the microscope in Toronto and makes him a third liner on nearly any team, but he has a skill set that Arizona still lacks. He could form a useful shutdown line with Nick Bjugstad and Lawson Crouse — imagine that.

Dylan Guenther, the ninth overall pick in 2021, is penciled in for his first full NHL season and should play every night in Arizona’s middle six, if not alongside Cooley. He had 15 points in 33 games with the Coyotes last season before heading back to juniors, where he won a WHL title and had 10 points for Canada at the world juniors.

Defensively, there’s probably a bit less to be excited about, though it’s almost certain to be a better group overall. Sean Durzi, acquired from the Los Angeles Kings, would add something to the table in a top-four role, mainly on the offensive end and, at times, with some aggressive entry defense. He’s also got real power-play utility, putting up 16 points for the Kings in 2:06 there per game. Arizona has a few options to run its first unit, but Durzi has an early edge, according to longtime Coyotes insider Craig Morgan. Juuso Valimaki had an interesting season as a prospect reclamation project and could continue providing decent value on a second or third pair.

In net, they’re fine. Karel Vejmelka might not be a true No. 1, but he performed admirably last season. Anaheim’s John Gibson was the only starter to face more high-danger shots on a nightly basis than Vejmelka’s 10.6. In November and December, he dragged the Coyotes to 23 points in 20 games, putting up a .914 save percentage and the third-best Goals Saved Expected in the league (14.04). Backup Connor Ingram put up a .907 in 27 appearances last season; a key for Arizona may be using him a bit more frequently to help Vejmelka stay fresh.

The weaknesses

We’re harping on Cooley’s development here. It’s a big deal, no matter what — and a bigger one, given Arizona’s glaring lack of a No. 1 center. Barrett Hayton has a place in the NHL, and maybe in the top six. Based on Net Rating, though, he’s projected to perform like a low-end second-liner in 2023-24, or a good 3C. Hayton produced well once he moved up to the top line with Keller and Schmaltz, but the fact he didn’t contribute much of anything before that isn’t the best sign. Sznajder’s tracking data looks especially grim for Hayton where he looked more like a passenger than a contributor on that line.

Now, is it easy to imagine him developing a bit more, given that he’s still only 23 and was the No.5 pick in 2018? Certainly. In March, he put up 17 points in 16 games, which is a hot streak worth mentioning.

The best, most realistic case for Arizona, though, would be him settling in as a solid second liner. He’d need to get there on his own merit, though, not just through playing on a line with two All-Star-caliber wingers, and he isn’t there yet. Overall, their lack of proven depth down the middle and crumminess as a defensive group (beyond nothing-but-defense addition Nick Bjugstad) drives down their rating. The group isn’t terrible. It isn’t good, either.

On defense, the Coyotes’ weaknesses are very real. We should state that up top, especially when viewed in context with the rest of the league. But we’re also going to say it again: this team could’ve been worse. Much worse. Much, much worse.

Take Matt Dumba. Signing him for one year and $3.9 million made the Coyotes better than they’d be otherwise, if only based on who else in the organization (or on the market) would’ve taken his minutes. Jonas Brodin was his most frequent partner last season in Minnesota, and the two were fine together. As a first-pair defenseman at this point in his career, though, he’s likely to be overextended in Arizona. That doesn’t make him a bad player or a bad signing — but he also isn’t likely to bring enough value on either end to compare with a middle-of-the-road top-pair defenseman. The Coyotes’ rating suffers less than it would’ve without him, but it still suffers overall.

J.J. Moser may well see more ice time than Dumba; he played more than 21 minutes a game in his first full NHL season and performed a tick better than the average Coyote in terms of expected goals percentage. Only Jakob Chychrun and Shayne Gostisbehere played more on Arizona’s blue line last season. At 23, about to start his second season in North America, there is room for improvement after taking a big step forward last season. His poor Net Rating is partially a result of a very weak rookie season, though he’s still far from an ideal option at the top of the lineup.

Victor Soderstrom seems to have a solid chance at sticking in the lineup this season — which is good for him and suboptimal for the Coyotes, given he was a first-rounder in 2019 who went one pick ahead of Matt Boldy. If he plays over Josh Brown, Arizona will be better for it, but a “half-decent No. 6 defenseman” is not an ideal ceiling for a No. 11 pick.

The wild card

How good can Logan Cooley be in his rookie season?

When a player’s drafted as high as third overall, it’s usually because of their impressive ceiling, a higher probability of the player hitting that potential, and a quicker timeline to get to that impact status.

A first-overall pick, for example, is projected to be worth 17.7 wins over their first seven seasons post-draft. At third overall, where Cooley was selected, the player’s worth 10.2 over those same seven seasons.

A big difference for third overall picks over the last 10 years is that many don’t spend their draft-plus-one season at the NHL level. Jonathan Drouin, Jonathan Huberdeau, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Miro Heiskanen, and Dylan Strome didn’t. Mason McTavish, the Ducks’ 2021 selection, only played nine NHL games that year.

So Cooley really isn’t behind the ball for playing one more year at the NCAA level.

Most third-overall picks have solid rookie seasons. Someone like Strome is the outlier, as he didn’t play a full year until his draft-plus-three season. A rocky season is a legitimate possibility, but there’s more evidence to point to a more impactful season.

The average third overall pick, over the last 10 years, has played about 64 games in their rookie seasons in their draft-plus-one or two seasons, scoring about 0.48 points per game rate (which equates to 39 across a full season). The highs of that group are McTavish and Dubois, who crossed the 40-point threshold. And that’s a milestone that should be within reach for Cooley considering his NCAA production. That, paired with the rise in NHL scoring over the last few years, could absolutely put the 50-point mark within reach.

Cooley’s projected to be the third-best player on this team with a Net Rating of plus-four. The potential is there for him to be a difference-maker in the early goings of his NHL career, as are the minutes. But Arizona still has to keep pace with the rookie to avoid overwhelming him or stunting his development just to fit a need.

The best case

Cooley is an immediate star and is the top-line center Arizona has been searching decades for. The young blue line gels, the kids take a big step forward and the Coyotes make a shocking push for a playoff spot.

The worst case

Cooley looks out of his depth in his first season and no one steps up on a weak and porous blue line that gets picked apart all season. The Coyotes fail to take a step forward and land in the league’s basement. Again.

The bottom line

There’s still a ton of work to do to become a playoff team, but the Coyotes actually showing signs of progress is meaningful after years of pain. The makings of an up-and-coming core are in place, with real secondary talent to provide the support.

The process isn’t over just yet, but this season has the chance to be the first step back around the corner after years of dwelling in the league’s basement. Arizona just has to run with the opportunity that this roster is presenting on paper.