What do the Utah Hockey Club and MC Hammer have in common?
They can’t be touched.
Utah fans hope, though, that the team can maintain a bit more longevity than the musician did. Ten days after their shootout loss to the Minnesota Wild, Utah HC returned the favor, beating them 2-1 in Minneapolis Friday night.
Utah has now won four straight games and seven straight road games.
“They’re a tough team to play,” Utah head coach André Tourigny said of the Wild after the game. “They have elite players, but (I’m) really happy about the way we played against their top players in the second part of the game.”
With two goals against the Wild, Dylan Guenther extended his goal streak to four games and his point streak to seven. He’s now tied for 11th in goals league-wide with 16.
Utah signed the 21-year-old to an eight-year, $57.14 million deal during training camp. It’s the new trend in the NHL to give long-term deals to young players before they really break out. A few teams have probably regretted doing it, but when it works, the general manager looks like a genius.
Bill Armstrong sure looks like a genius right now.
Current mood: pic.twitter.com/WwfqD5Ohle
The team is maturing as a group. It wasn’t that long ago that they’d squander multi-goal leads under the slightest bit of pressure, but they seem to have corrected that issue now.
A great indication of that is how they reacted to the Wild’s goal Friday. Exactly one minute after the Wild scored, Utah was celebrating a goal of its own.
“We’ve been in that situation a lot, so I think we’re getting better at it,” Guenther said after the game.
Guenther’s quote can be boiled down to one word: experience. Rebuilding teams have to learn how to win. They have to experience tough losses and figure out how to prevent leads from slipping away the next time. The more experience they gain, the more equipped they are for any situation that arises.
One wasn't enough for Gunner 💪 pic.twitter.com/fM27lRvIRc
Utah, of course, has a good group of guys that have won the Stanley Cup before. That’s invaluable experience to have in the locker room because there has never been a Stanley Cup-winning team that didn’t experience adversity. Those players know what it takes to be successful, and their experience makes them more valuable.
“Good teams find ways to win,” Guenther said.
Tourigny added some perspective on what it’s taken for his team to improve.
“You don’t go from struggling a little bit to winning on a consistent basis,” he said. “You climb slowly and start to play better defensively and even if we weren’t winning a lot, we were playing better.”
When is it time to start including Karel Vejmelka in the Vezina Trophy conversation?
I’m not saying he should necessarily win the thing, but I do think he’ll deserve to be on the ballot if he can keep his current play up for a few more months.
Among goalies that have played at least 10 games this season, he’s third in high-danger save percentage, fourth in goals-against average, fifth in save percentage and sixth in goals saved above average.
There are only two other goalies in the top 10 in all four of those categories: Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck and Toronto’s Anthony Stolarz.
As Cory Wilkins from the Clean Hits podcast pointed out to me after the game, Vejmelka is doing it all with a less-than-optimal defensive corps. Just imagine what his stats would look like with Sean Durzi and John Marino in the lineup.
“It’s all about focus — to be ready,” Vejmelka said after Friday’s game. “It doesn’t matter what (happens), just be ready for another shot, try to find the puck early.”
Vejmelka’s team wasn’t bad in front of him Friday, per se, but the Wild are an excellent offensive team that finds ways to get the puck to the net.
Vejmelka found a way to shut them down almost every time, earning 28 saves.
Utah HC has Saturday off before a set of back-to-back home home games on Sunday and Monday.
First up are the Anaheim Ducks. The two teams have met once before, a 5-4 overtime win for the Ducks back in October. A lot has happened since then, landing Utah four spots above Anaheim in the Western Conference standings.
The main problem for Utah HC the last time they played the Ducks was that they struggled to move the puck up the ice. It was their first full game without Durzi because of injury, and it took them a bit to adjust.
A number of guys have stepped up since then, which has contributed in a major way to their recent success.
Don’t get it twisted, though: There is no such thing as an easy win in the NHL. The league’s best team, the Winnipeg Jets, learned that the hard way on Wednesday, suffering a 3-2 regulation loss to the 28th-place Ducks.
Sunday’s contest is an afternoon game with a 3 p.m. start time. It will be available to local fans via Utah 16 and Utah HC+. Tickets to the game are also available, starting at $36 on Ticketmaster at the time of writing.
