The potential is there. The Arizona Coyotes have young talent up front and veteran skill on defense. They have a new coach, Rick Tocchet, who was on the Pittsburgh Penguins' staff when they emphasized speed and won the Stanley Cup in back-to back years.
Get the puck out of their end and up to those forwards as quickly as possible, and the Coyotes can spend more time in the offensive zone and maximize that talent.
But for now it's a work in progress. After taking a 4-1 lead in their opener at the Anaheim Ducks on Thursday, the Coyotes started sitting back in a 1-2-2, some of them reverting to the style of their old coach, Dave Tippett. They ended up losing 5-4.
"I don't want to play that way," Tocchet said. "I want to try to make it 5-1. We've still got to play good defense. We still want to be good in our [defensive] zone. But I want to put the foot on the pedal, and we obviously let the foot off the pedal."
They kept it off too much in their home opener against the Vegas Golden Knights on Saturday. Arizona took an early 1-0 lead but was outshot 32-17 through two periods, allowed the tying goal with 1:12 left in the third and lost in overtime, 2-1.
"We're not playing fast enough," defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson said. "We've been talking about playing fast, but we didn't even do that. So it was embarrassing for two periods. It was the same in the first game. We stopped playing a little bit instead of pushing forward and keep pushing for the next goal. We back off."
Tocchet is trying to create a consistent mindset. He wants his players thinking about playing fast when they come to the rink, not just generally, but specific to their assignment. Say a player is stretching. He wants him thinking about an opponent, like, "I'm going to get into a footrace with this guy. I want the puck in these areas." As the Penguins have shown, playing fast isn't always about tape-to-tape passes. It's about putting the puck into space and skating into it.
"I don't like using the word fragile, but it's a belief in what we're doing," Tocchet said. "We might be down 2-0, or we might be two [goals] up. We've got to play the same way. You can't change things because things do go right or wrong. We are who we are, and we have to show that swagger.
"If we're going to play that style, we have to do it 60 minutes. You can't just change because we going to do a prevent defense or whatever or we're down 2-0 and all of a sudden individuals are going to stickhandle through the whole team. We've got to be who we are, and I think that's the biggest challenge for the team, to have that identity."
The Coyotes play the Golden Knights in Vegas' inaugural home opener at T-Mobile Arena on Tuesday (10 p.m. ET; NBCSN, SN360, TVA Sports, NHL.TV).
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