How the Utah Hockey Club will improve its player pool this offseason

When now-Utah GM Bill Armstrong laid out his grand plan for rebuilding the Coyotes, acquiring a glut of draft assets and hiring an elite scouting staff were the foundational pieces. When Armstrong finally began stripping the team down to acquire the draft assets after the 2020-21 season, he answered one of my questions with a wish.

“In a perfect world,” I asked, “how long do you hope ownership allows you to keep stockpiling draft assets and making high draft picks before trying to win?”

“I hope they give me five years,” he said sheepishly. “When you look at the cupboards right now; they’re pretty bare. And when you look at how long it takes to truly stock them and build a team, you need that long.”

The Coyotes’ tenuous place in the Valley and the massive annual losses incurred by owner Alex Meruelo (I’ve heard estimates between $50 million and $60 million the past two seasons) gave Armstrong the perfect cover to do his work. Unlike past ownership groups in the Valley, there was no short-sighted pressure on the GM to field a playoff product immediately because the Meruelos were running a lean operation to limit their losses. 

Credit Meruelo for at least allowing Armstrong to build an excellent scouting staff and an equally impressive development staff, but spending on free agents and trading for high-priced talent made no sense the past few seasons. The Coyotes needed to lose because they needed high draft picks to acquire the elite talent necessary for sustained success — and they needed a lot of draft picks to acquire the depth necessary for sustained success.

As Utah approaches the 2024 NHL Draft this weekend in Las Vegas, Armstrong and his scouting staff are entering Year 4 of that plan. You can sense a slight change in the way the GM is thinking, but while he is hoping to make some moves on the trade market and in free agency, Armstrong has no plans to cash in all his chips and play the playoffs-or-bust game this offseason.

“We could spend all our money this year and then we’d be locked up for the next five and seven years,” he said. “One of the issues that you have at this stage is if you go to add too many free agents for long term at this moment, five years from now, when Logan Cooley is at the top of his game and Dylan Guenther is at the top of his game, those guys that you signed are now 35 and 36 and they’re weighing you down.

“Your team gets out of whack and now you’re doing buyouts and you’re paying people to take bad contracts and you’re spending all your assets to try and bail yourself out of what you did five, six years ago. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. You have to let your team grow organically while trying to give them complementary players to bring the best out of them and make your team as competitive as you can without punishing yourself in the future.”

The turnaround time between the NHL Draft and the start of free agency is always tight, but this year, the window is just two days. With that in mind, and with the understanding that draft-day trades are a strong possibility that could also alter Utah’s free agency plans, here’s a look at the Utah master plan for the offseason. The plan encompasses the draft, the trade market, re-signing their own free agents, and acquiring external free agents.

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The NHL Draft

The Utah Hockey Club is in the same boat as the Blackhawks, Ducks, Blue Jackets, Senators, Kraken, Flames and Devils when it comes to making their selection at No. 6.

“It has been a complicated draft to analyze,” Utah director of amateur scouting Darryl Plandowski said. “We know that Macklin Celebrini is No. 1, but I don’t think there is a consensus No. 2 or No. 3 or No. 4 or No. 5. It’s unlike a lot of years where you kind of know who the top 10 are, and for sure, the top five. You can usually figure out who’s gonna go where. This year, other than No. 1, I think everybody’s waiting to see what happens.”

Here’s a sampling of the projected top six picks from four well-known draft analysts, along with links to their mock drafts. Each analyst has Utah selecting a different player at No. 6.

“The unknown of the Russians has played a factor,” Plandowski said. “When you don’t watch players play live, it throws you off a little bit. Everybody’s excited about them because they’re good players, but nobody’s seen them so their rankings are all over the place.  

“Last year, kind of their whole country camp went to Belarus so we got in and saw them. This year, it was deep into Russia so nobody went in. And then Lindstrom got hurt. There’s just different things that have happened that are throwing everybody off. I think if you went to 10 different teams they’d have 10 different top-10s.”

What analysts agree upon is that there is a handful of players in this draft — Levshunov, Silayev, Buium, Dickinson and maybe Zayne Parekh — with the ability to be top-four or top-pair defensemen.

While Celebrini is the consensus No. 1 pick, Ivan Demidov is creeping up the boards after the scouting combine, and Lindstrom is still drawing excellent reviews among the forwards.

When it comes to goalies, there just aren’t many highly-rated prospects in this draft, making the Coyotes look wise for selecting three in 2023.

“We’ve done a nice job over the last couple of years of making sure that we’ve got some depth everywhere,” Utah associate director of amateur scouting Ryan Jankowski said. “With our picks last year, going defenseman then forward then goalie in the top 38, and then the year before where you go [Logan] Cooley, [Conor] Geekie, [Maveric] Lamoureux, and follow that up with [Artem] Duda, we’ve got a good mix of defenseman, we’ve got a good mix of forwards and a good mix of goalies

“We actually talked about it right after the draft last year that it actually sets us up really nicely this year. We’re not looking for something in particular. As the draft goes on, if we take a forward at No. 6, maybe we do have to take a defenseman at No. 38, but then with those three second-[round picks] it can balance itself out. I can guarantee you we will not take four forwards with the first four picks, nor will we pick four defenseman. We will want it to be balanced out.”

While the Utah brain trust agreed that there is not much momentum for a team trading out of the top five, the idea that Utah might trade the No. 6 overall pick to acquire a top-pair defenseman or a scoring wing isn’t out of the question. In fact, it lines up with a point Armstrong made late in the 2023-24 season.

“We know we have to rebuild our blue line,” he said. “We have a couple ways we can go about doing that.”

Trades

Because Utah has such a glut of draft assets available to it over the next three years — 20 picks in the first three rounds — Armstrong can afford to move some if it means acquiring a player who can help both now and in the future.

“I think you can look at how we got Sean Durzi last year as an example,” Armstrong said. “We’ll keep our nose to the grindstone and see if we can find some deals. Maybe we’ll move a couple picks to get a player. Free agency is another option although, again, you have to be careful there. And then you never know if you might pick somebody through the draft that can play right away.”

Whatever Utah acquires via the trade route, don’t expect those players to be on the wrong side of 30 years old unless they are short-term, economical solutions to help the core. Armstrong is still building for the long-term future of the team. He is not acquiring players to push him over the top right away. He wants players who can grow with the current core, but there is no question that Utah would like to add top-end skill to their blue line, and perhaps a scoring wing.

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Utah free agents

Utah surprised some analysts when it re-signed forward Liam O’Brien to a three-year contract with an average annual value of $1 million. O’Brien is a depth forward who will likely be out of the lineup on some nights, but if you understand the longstanding relationship he has with Tourigny, as well as his place in the dressing room, you understand why he’ll be sticking around for a while.

The area that still needs addressing is the blue line. Utah does not have a single NHL defenseman under contract for next season, but that will change in free agency.

Armstrong said he expects to sign all four key defensemen who are currently restricted free agents, Sean Durzi, JJ Moser, Juuso Välimäki and Michael Kesselring. The same goes for center Barrett Hayton.

All five players have arbitration rights, but unlike past years when the Meruelo Group’s people made those negotiations unnecessarily arduous, all five should be back in the fold to help round out the roster, even if some go to arbitration.

There are several minor-league players — notably RFA defenseman Victor Söderström — on whom the team must also make decisions.

One other player to keep an eye on is defenseman Artem Duda, a 2022 second-round pick (No. 36) who has endured an odyssey over the past year. Utah is working to sign him this season. The issue is trying to extricate him from his Russian contract. Per sources, it is in the league’s hands. If/when he does sign, he’ll play in Tucson this season.

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External free agents

Perhaps the most misleading narrative surrounding Utah this offseason is that the team will be “a big player” in the free-agency market.

Utah has some work to do simply to reach the newly installed cap floor of $65 million. The team’s current cap hit, per the soon-to-darkened Cap Friendly is $45,435,476. On the other hand, signing the five restricted free agents listed above will eat up a significant chunk of that cap space.

More importantly, the free-agent crop isn’t very deep. That’s helpful because going after big-ticket free agents is not Armstrong’s MO at this stage of the rebuild, which is nearing completion. If Armstrong signs a significant free agent, he’ll want to do it on a shorter term.

“We’ll add some key veterans through free agency on the back side and see if we can pull a couple trades off and become a better team than we were the year before,” Armstrong said. “I think the difference for us now is we’re trying to become a better organization top to bottom and we have to provide better depth so when someone gets hurt on the NHL team, that next guy is going to help the big club get through three, four, five or six games up top by contributing.

“We’ll be signing two-way guys who allow our young prospects to be protected so we won’t be calling them up and down like a yo-yo where you look and then a whole year of development goes by. I think we did a really good job of that with Guenther. We were very clear and communicated. That’s the approach we need to take.”

Top photo of Utah GM Bill Armstrong (left) and coach André Tourigny via Getty Images

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