Picks: Ducks will continue to roll vs. Coyotes
The Anaheim Ducks take a four-game winning streak into Monday night’s game. (USATSI)
Welcome to the NHL Daily Picks where hockey writers Adam Gretz and Chris Peters make their selections for all of the day’s games.
Arizona Coyotes vs. Anaheim Ducks, 10 p.m. ET
Will the real Anaheim Ducks please stand up?
After starting the season with a miserable 1-7-2 run that saw them score just 10 goals and quickly fall to the bottom of the Western Conference standings, the Ducks are starting to play their way out of that hole and take a four-game winning streak into their game on Monday night against the Arizona Coyotes, the lone game on the NHL schedule for the night.
It was only a matter of time until this happened because this Ducks team is too good and too talented to be this bad. The only question was whether or not they would turn it around fast enough to salvage the season (and yes, November is far enough into the season to start worrying about that when your start is as bad as Anaheim’s was).
What is most amazing about the Ducks’ early struggles is that the team wasn’t always playing all that poorly. They have allowed more than two goals in just five of their first 14 games thanks in large part to the play of goaltender Frederik Andersen, and they enter play on Monday eighth in the NHL in goals against.
The issue was simply the fact that they could not score, and the struggles were starting to reach historical levels.
The goal scoring is finally starting to pick up a little for the Ducks and their 12 goals during their current winning streak are already more than they scored over the first 10 games of the season. The schedule has certainly turned in their favor with games against Florida and Columbus over the past week, and now they get back-to-back home games against Arizona and Edmonton to potentially keep this momentum going.
Arizona is an interesting team because even though they’re probably not going to win a ton of games this season (they’ve already slowed down after a 3-0 start) they can be one of the more exciting teams in the league thanks to their dynamic rookies, Max Domi and Anthony Duclair. The problem they’re going to run into is that eventually those two are going to hit a dry spell offensively, and when they do, there is not enough secondary scoring to help pick up the rest of the team. The Ducks have been doing a fine job shutting teams down this season — even when they were losing — and should be able to do the same against Arizona on Monday to extend their winning streak. Pick: Ducks 3, Coyotes 1
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