- Andre Tourigny says the Mammoth are done just surviving in the NHL
- Utah avoided players over 30 a year ago, then added Vincent Trocheck and Anders Lee
- Read below for why Sebastian Cossa could push Karel Vejmelka for starts
Andre Tourigny is done watching the Mammoth just hang around.
Utah’s coach drew a line between two ways of living in the NHL when he laid out where his team goes next. “It’s not about surviving,” Tourigny said. “It’s about winning.”
He framed it another way after signing his extension in June: “There’s surviving in the NHL and there’s playing in the NHL.”
The surviving part is settled. Utah went 38-31-13 in its first season in Salt Lake and finished seven points out of the second wild card, then went 43-33-6 last year to take the first wild card before Vegas closed it out in six games.
Wes Crosby’s 32 in 32 look at the Mammoth for NHL.com lays out how the roster shifted to match that bar. A year ago, president of hockey operations Chris Armstrong and general manager Bill Armstrong steered clear of players over 30. This summer they handed 36-year-old Anders Lee a three-year, $16.2 million contract and brought in 33-year-old Vincent Trocheck from the Rangers.
Bill Armstrong pointed at the Vegas series when he explained the change in approach.
“We went into that series against Vegas, and you look at it, they had an older, experienced club. You still need people that have done it at a high level for a long time in the National Hockey League to kind of lead the way.”
The experience gap is not subtle. Clayton Keller, Lawson Crouse, Nick Schmaltz, Dylan Guenther and Logan Cooley have 52 playoff games between them. Trocheck and Lee have 112.
Here’s how the Rangers sent Trocheck off:
Cooley is the swing piece. The 22-year-old had 43 points in 54 games last season around a lower-body injury he suffered Dec. 5, and he now gets to play alongside a fellow Pittsburgh kid he grew up skating with in the summers. Trocheck was asked about that history.
“I watched him when he was 12. He was skating with us and making me look bad. He still does that now.”
Goaltending is the other open question. Karel Vejmelka went 38-20-3 with a .896 save percentage in 64 games but lost four of six starts against Vegas, and Sebastian Cossa arrived from Detroit in June on a two-year contract with 70 AHL wins behind him.
Watch Cossa on his first impressions of the organization:
The Mammoth return their entire top six outside of JJ Peterka, who went to Boston for a pair of first-round picks. The rest of the Central came out of the summer thinner than it went in. Tourigny picked a good year to raise the bar.
