Opening night on the road at someone else's home opening is always rough.
Add in injuries to three of your most key players, including two of your top three centres - Chychrun, Dvorak and Galchenyuk - and it's not a recipe for success.
Still, given the situation, the Coyotes didn't do too badly.
Ignore one two minute span, and it's a 0-0 game for 58 minutes.
Consider three or four goal posts, (one coming right before Dallas scored) and maybe the Coyotes could have won.
It's not like they were really outplayed.
The Coyotes controlled 54% of the game, 58% of the shots, and they had more scoring chances.
Sometimes, you play good and you lose.
But if you have a team missing some key members and you put up a good fight, that should be enough. A win is nice, but its more important to trust the process and know that if you play well, you'll win more than you lose.
If the Coyotes play like they did last night, they'll be a good team.
I really liked how the coach paired Keller and Strome together. That could be an amazing combination, and even though they didn't score, they got 7 minutes together and looked good.
One thing I've always thought Tocchet did poorly in his first season was allot ice time. Last night he ended up playing Nick Cousins more at 5v5 than either Keller or Strome.
When you end up shut-out, that doesn't look very good.
I think Tocchet learned a lot last year, and he seemed to improve as the year went on (for example, early in the year he had the goalie pulled with Nick Cousins and Zach Rinaldo both on the ice, which is just coaching equivalent of Patrick Stefan whiffing on an empty net).
He's got to get a handle on ice-time though- Not only is it harder to score when you're grinders get too much ice time, but it's impossible to get on the power-play too.
Now, of course he was line matching Seguin and trying to get Cousins out there, but it's really worth asking if this classic coaching strategy makes any sense.
Consider that Seguin put up an alarming 70% CF rating when on the ice against Cousins and a 70% against Stepan in roughly the same amount of ice-time against each.
The fact is, the Coyotes defenseman can't handle a player like Seguin (who really can?) and defenseman matter way more than forwards do when it comes to matching up.
All the trouble to try and get your "shutdown" line out against Seguin and you end up making no discernible difference in anything but playing your offensive players less.
Other than try to get your best players away from the other team's best defensive defenseman, I really think coaches just hurt themselves trying to match up.
There is no excuse for playing Cousins as much as Keller, Stepan and Strome.
Overall, good game but I would have obviously liked a different result.
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