If you’ve ever heard an NHL general manager talk about roster construction, you’ve probably heard the phrase “he knows how to win.”
That’s especially a priority for the Utah Mammoth.
Of the 29 guys who played games for the Mammoth this season, 24 have won championships or gold medals at other playing levels. The idea is that when you win once, you know what it takes to do it again.
“You hear about how hard it is to win the Cup, but once you’re actually in it, it takes everyone. It takes every shift, every game. You can’t take a shift off. So that’s definitely eye-opening for me.”
— Utah Mammoth center Logan Cooley
But even with all that experience in high-intensity games, the Mammoth were bounced from the Stanley Cup Playoffs in the first round. That begs the question: Does previous success actually help you win again?
Logan Cooley has won a gold medal at the World Championship. He also lost by one goal in an NCAA national championship game. Even still, he was still surprised by the intensity of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“I think it’s a completely different game,” he said during his exit interview. “(Previous experience) definitely helps prepare you with being in high-pressure moments and when it’s do-or-die. Those definitely help, but I think playoffs are just a different animal, just how physical, how fast the games are.
“I don’t think anything could really compare to that.”
Dylan Guenther, a two-time Western Hockey League champion with gold medals at both the U18 and U20 levels and the golden goal in the latter, says his pre-NHL success equipped him for the moment.
“I feel like it prepares you well, like, playing in those big games and even playing in the playoffs in junior,” he said. “Like, still seven-game series, you’re still breaking down the other team. I think it prepares you. But yeah, I mean, just the crowd and the people watching on TV and stuff, I think it’s just a lot of fun to be there and to have that. Makes you want to be back there.”
Perhaps the difference in readiness comes from the playoff formats of the respective players’ pre-NHL routes.
Cooley played at the U.S. National Team Development Program, followed by a season at the University of Minnesota. He did not experience a multiple-game playoff series at either level, meaning this year’s matchup with the Vegas Golden Knights was his first experience with a seven-game series format.
Guenther, on the other hand, played in the WHL, where the playoffs follow the same format as the NHL: four rounds of up to seven games each. He was acquainted with the grind of the Stanley Cup Playoffs because he’d been through a similar situation so many times before.
Head coach André Tourigny, who spent 14 years as a coach in the Canadian Hockey League has coached a number of single-game-elimination international tournaments, offered his persepctive.
“(The Stanley Cup Playoffs are) different than international tournaments because if you beat Finland in (the) semifinal, you don’t play them in (the) final. It’s a different opponent, it’s new all the time.”
That said, it’s also a major step up from major-junior hockey.
“It’s junior on steroids,” Tourigny said.
Don’t take this to mean that the players who took the college route are underprepared. Plenty of them turn into dominant NHL stars. But perhaps they’d be even more NHL-ready if the NCAA switched to a full playoff format, rather than single-game elimination.
Cooley, for example, was more than ready for the intensity in Game 1 against Vegas. He scored in that game and the next, and tallied an assist in Game 3 for a three-game point streak. But as the series wore on, the Golden Knights began to recognize his tendencies, allowing them to hold him pointless throughout the latter three games.
“You hear about how hard it is to win the Cup, but once you’re actually in it, it takes everyone. It takes every shift, every game. You can’t take a shift off. So that’s definitely eye-opening for me,” Cooley said.
Captain Clayton Keller added his perspective.
“I think as we learn and get into the playoffs and get into those key moments, we’re only going to get better and more comfortable,” he said. “I think that’s how you win — you have to go through some (tough) times to get over the hump and to learn just how hard it is to win.”
