Teams that barely miss the playoffs tend to look back at squandered games with a degree of regret. If the Utah Mammoth miss the mark this year, their 3-1 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks on Monday will be one of those instances.
Here’s the story.
Quick catchup
Chicago Blackhawks: 3
Utah Mammoth: 1
Both teams failed to crack the score sheet until nearly the halfway point in the game. That’s not what you expect when two of the league’s youngest teams face off.
Blackhawks forward Ilya Mikheyev broke the ice with a greasy goal — something Mammoth head coach André Tourigny said his team needs to have more of.
JJ Peterka tied it up a minute into the third period with his first goal as a Mammoth, but André Burakovsky found the puck on his stick in a prime location and put the Hawks back on top less than eight minutes later.
Just as the Mammoth were starting to think about pulling the goalie for an extra attacker, John Marino took an accidental (but costly) high-sticking penalty, making it much harder for his team to push for a tying goal.
When they were finally able to get Vítek Vaněček to the bench, Mikheyev scored an empty-netter to seal it for Chicago.
“We did a lot of good stuff,” Tourigny said. “In order to get over the hump and win those games, we need to be harder inside, we need to be harder at the net. We need to get those greasy goals.”
Takeaways
Sacrificing offense in favor of defense?
Through three games, the Mammoth have scored just four goals in regulation. That seems counterintuitive, considering the firepower they added over the offseason.
On the other hand, they’ve done a great job at suppressing shots. They have yet to allow 30 in a game, and they held the Blackhawks to just 14 bids on Monday.
It seems like the Mammoth are sacrificing offense for the sake of defensive responsibility. As frustrating as struggling to score must be for players and fans alike, it does show a type of maturity that everyone should be proud of.
Stanley Cup-winning teams know how to shut opponents down the way the Mammoth have, and once they figure out the balance, they should be able to add scoring to the mix.
Getting too fancy
Remember Michael Scott’s advice to Dwight Schrute? “Keep it simple, stupid.”
That’s what the Mammoth need to do when they do get scoring chances. On too many occasions Monday, their top players had the puck in prime shooting locations but chose to dish it to teammates instead, adding an unnecessary level of risk to the play.
In one instance, for example, Clayton Keller got the puck in the slot with nobody between him and Blackhawks goalie Spencer Knight. But rather than firing it, he attempted to pass it to Nick Schmaltz, who wasn’t quite set, resulting in a broken play.
At another point in the game, Mikhail Sergachev had a clear shot on net from the point with plenty of traffic screening Knight. Instead of taking the shot, though, he passed it to the right winger who didn’t have much to shoot at.
As skilled as these guys are, it shouldn’t always be a competition to see who can make the fanciest play. An accidental goal that pinballs off three guys and in counts for just as much as a coast-to-coast goal.
“We’ve just been too perimeter, and when we have gotten around the net, we haven’t been hard enough. We’ve got to fight around there,” said Barrett Hayton, who played his first game of the season after missing the first two with an injury.
Dmitri Simashev looking like he belongs
In his third NHL game, Dmitri Simashev played a career high 17:28, including his first 40 seconds of short-handed time.
Aside from one bad pass during his first shift of the game, Simashev was brilliant. He takes up space, making it hard for opponents to get anything through him. In fact, he has yet to allow a goal while he’s on the ice.
Toward the end of the game, he was paired with his housemate, Sergachev. Although both guys shoot left, Simashev has played much of his career on the right side. The Mammoth (and the NHL as a whole) have a surplus of left-handed defensemen, so now that Sean Durzi is out for a while, Simashev playing on the right side could make a lot of sense.
Goal of the game
JJ Peterka’s first goal as a Utah Mammoth
Although the season hasn’t started exactly the way the Mammoth have wanted it to, the line of Peterka, Logan Cooley and Dylan Guenther is a great success story so far.
They’ve been in on four of Utah’s five goals this season, and Guenther is on a three-game point streak. He had a big hand in Peterka’s goal in Chicago.
“Just pressuring them. I think that was the key,” Peterka said of his goal. “To get chances off the forecheck and kind of sit on them, that’s also how the goal went in.”