Entering Monday night’s matchup with the Chicago Blackhawks, the Arizona Coyotes didn’t look like one of the NHL’s most potent offenses.
The Coyotes ranked 23rd in the NHL in scoring (2.71 goals per game), a number that didn’t seem particularly fluky considering their personnel — and the fact they scored almost the exact same amount last season (2.74 goals/game).
After Connor Bedard scored within the first 30 seconds of Monday’s contest, the floodgates opened on Arizona’s offense as the team managed to score eight goals, a massive total for a squad that hadn’t topped six markers in its last 115 games.
The fact the Coyotes were able to light up Chicago wasn’t particularly surprising considering the Blackhawks are a rebuilding squad that entered the game with a 3-5 record and a minus-6 goal differential.
How they went about doing it is mind-boggling, though.
In a game where the Coyotes created their best offensive output in well over a year, their first line of Clayton Keller, Barrett Hayton, and Nick Schmaltz were held off the scoresheet. The second line of Matias Maccelli, Nick Bjugstad, and Lawson Crouse only managed an assist each. Hotshot rookie Logan Cooley also chipped in just a single helper.
The effort instead was headlined by Michael Carcone — a 27-year-old who entered the game with seven goals in his NHL career. Based on that information alone, this would seem to be one of the most improbable hat tricks of all time, but Carcone’s offensive game has been growing over the last few years.
Prior to 2021-22 he’d never topped 27 points in six AHL seasons, but in that year he seemed to turn the corner, scoring 24 goals and putting up 41 points in 48 games — and earning a 21-game NHL cameo. Last season he took another major step, leading the AHL in points (85) despite playing just 65 games thanks to another nine-game stretch with the Coyotes.
Carcone is far from a proven commodity at the highest level of the game, but his recent AHL resume suggests a game like Monday’s is within his reach — especially with the help of a little luck.
There’s an argument to be made that the two-goal, four-point night the Coyotes got from Jack McBain was even more surprising. The fourth-line center was playing in his 100th game, and his first 99 had yielded just three multi-point efforts, each of them going for two points.
McBain didn’t even produce a single four-point effort in his entire four-year, 117-game collegiate career at Boston College, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he looked in Monday’s clash.
Another unlikely source of offense the Coyotes benefited from on Monday was journeyman veteran defenseman Josh Brown, who came into the game with eight goals in 242 NHL games while taking fewer than one shot per night (0.82).
To cap it off, Arizona got a goal from Liam O’Connor, an enforcer who’s never scored more than three times in the seven NHL seasons he’s appeared in. The 29-year-old had 52.5 penalty minutes for every goal he’d scored in his career prior to Monday’s action. Appropriately, he got his marker by skating directly at the net and cramming in a rebound.
To be fair, O’Brien also did what he’s better known for, squaring off against Nick Foligno to earn a Gordie Howe hat trick — a feat he shared with McBain.
Liam O’Brien and Jack McBain are the first teammates to have Gordie Howe hat tricks in the same game since 1988.
Jack’s father Andrew McBain was one of the players in that 1988 game 🤯 pic.twitter.com/5Yza58ohtu
— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) October 31, 2023
The only part of Arizona’s offensive outburst that came from a familiar source was Sean Durzi’s fourth goal of the season. Durzi has emerged as the top offensive defenseman on the Coyotes this season, but even he had a relatively modest 12 goals in his first two NHL seasons with the Los Angeles Kings.
If you were an extremely optimistic Coyotes fan you might say this performance provided evidence the team has some punch at the bottom of the lineup, and when its top-end forwards are rolling they could be on to something.
That might be true to an extent.
Whether Carcone can convert his AHL production into NHL success is at least interesting, for instance — especially now that he’s playing with Cooley at even strength and logging time on the team’s second power-play unit. Holding out much hope for guys like Brown and O’Brien to keep finding the twine would be foolish, though.
Realistically, this seems more like a freak occurrence than the beginning of a notable trend for the Coyotes — but it’s a good bit of a fun for a team that’s hardly provided that on a consistent basis in recent years.
