The Ottawa Senators have signed Tyler Boucher to a one-year, two-way deal worth $850,000 at the NHL level.
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Why should Utah Mammoth fans care about a borderline NHLer at the league’s minimum salary playing on the opposite side of the continent? Because it shows how differently things could have turned out for Utah with one different decision.
To understand the situation fully, we have to go back to 2020, when Bill Armstrong was hired to lead the then-Arizona Coyotes out of the darkness that had engulfed the franchise for the better part of two decades.
The Coyotes were in bad shape at the time. Such bad shape, in fact, that before Armstrong was hired, people around the league were advising him not to take the job.
Yes, the Coyotes had snuck into the playoffs the previous season (thanks in large part to the pandemic-induced expanded playoff format), but between seven different ownership groups, four different general managers, two arena locations — which would turn to three before the team moved — and more than two decades to figure everything out, the team had rarely been able to escape the gutter.
But Armstrong was determined to succeed.
His plan included a number of stages, the first of which being to accumulate as many draft picks as possible.
The pandemic pushed the 2020 NHL draft to October, three weeks after Armstrong joined the pack. Having been a major part of the St. Louis Blues’ scouting conversations as an assistant GM and director of amateur scouting that entire season, the agreement that allowed him to go to Arizona stipulated that he couldn’t be involved in that year’s draft.
It didn’t matter much, anyway. John Chayka, the Coyotes’ previous GM, had traded away the team’s first- and third-round picks and had lost the second-rounder due to draft combine testing violations.
To make matters worse, the team would renounce its rights to Mitchell Miller, the player it drafted in the fourth round, after receiving backlash from the public after the draft. Miller had pled guilty four years earlier to assault and a violation of the Ohio Safe Schools Act for bullying a classmate with a developmental disability.
With their highest retained pick coming in the fifth round, the 2020 draft was a write-off — despite how important drafting was to Armstrong’s rebuild plan.
The 2021 draft wasn’t supposed to be much better, either.
Arizona’s first-rounder that year had also been revoked by the league for Chayka’s aforementioned testing violation, meaning Armstrong wouldn’t get to make his first selection as GM until the second round of his second draft.
Remember, though, that his plan was to accumulate draft picks. That’s exactly what he did.
There’s a saying in the NHL that when one GM is drowning, the others don’t toss him life preservers — they throw him anchors.
Then-Vancouver Canucks GM Jim Benning was in the hot seat ahead of the 2021 draft, desperate to prove that his seven seasons at the helm were not for naught.
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Armstrong offered Benning his biggest anchor: Oliver Ekman-Larsson and his six remaining seasons at an $8.25 million price tag.
It cost Benning the ninth-overall pick as well as a second-rounder and a seventh-rounder. To sweeten the pot, the Canucks also gained Conor Garland and the Coyotes took Vancouver’s three worst contracts: Loui Eriksson, Antoine Roussel and Jay Beagle. Armstrong also agreed to pay 12% of Ekman-Larsson’s salary going forward.
“OEL” would only last two seasons in Vancouver before being bought out, but Armstrong used that ninth-overall pick to alter the future of the Coyotes/Mammoth.
Dylan Guenther, whom Armstrong selected with that pick, hit the 40-goal plateau this season — one of just 15 NHLers to do so. Having turned 23 in the penultimate week of the regular season, it’s likely that he hasn’t even reached his ceiling.
“I think that I’ve gotten better every single season,” Guenther said at his exit interview. “I just want continuous improvement. I mean, it might not show up all the time on the game sheet, but I think just trying to strive and trying to get a little bit better every single season is my goal.”
At a price tag just north of $7.1 million for the next seven seasons, he could also provide more value per dollar to his team than almost anyone else in the league.
That 2021 draft was a shot in the dark for most teams, as the pandemic had significantly altered most junior leagues around the world, causing some to play limited amounts of games and others to shut down altogether.
Looking back, Guenther should probably have gone second overall, behind only the original 23rd pick, Dallas Stars star Wyatt Johnston.
What is abundantly clear, though, is that Armstrong was smart to steer clear of Boucher, whom the Senators drafted one spot behind Guenther — despite how much sense it made to draft him at the time.
At 6-foot-2, Boucher fits the size profile that Armstrong is known to favor in his draft decisions. He’s also the son of former NHL goalie Brian Boucher, and was born in Arizona while his father played for the Coyotes.
Five years later, though, Guenther is a bona fide first-line winger and Boucher has yet to play an NHL game.
Had Armstrong gone that direction instead, the Mammoth wouldn’t look nearly as promising as they do today.
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