It can’t be easy to be the trendy pick. It must involve constantly worrying about what everyone is thinking about you, or you letting everyone down, what you’re wearing, did they get your good side, and constantly worrying about when the 15 minutes is up. Don’t have the longevity of contention to wash away the impending doom that impostor syndrome always infects a mind with.
The Utah Mammoth might not be there yet, but they were the trendy pick to crash the Western Conference playoff picture this season. And they’ve started the season with a three-game winless streak. Which includes losing to Nashville and Chicago, two of the teams that will make up the portion of the league that gets a juice and nap break every day. This is not what the Mammoth had in mind when they started pushing on the velvet rope of the top club.
Perhaps more worrying for Utah, is they’ve looked pretty toothless in two of their three losses. I know, how funny, a Mammoth looking toothless. Isn’t that their thing? But the truth is the truth (I resisted the urge to say “tooth” there, and I should be applauded for it). In their last two games against the Preds and Hawks, they’ve managed 45 shots combined. That’s not the mark of a sexy team we all thought was going to provide some NBA Jam highlights this season.
And it’s not as if the Mammoth are firing a ton of shots and just missing the net or having a bunch blocked. Against the Preds, they only had 24 attempts at 5-on-5. 24! Against the Avs in the opener and the Hawks last night, they only managed 52 and 50 attempts. This is a team that averaged over 60 at even-strength in ’24-’25. They’re just not creating anything right now.
Perhaps starting the season with a three-game trip is always a tough ask for a young team. Perhaps last night in Chicago, they just spent 60 minutes wistfully dreaming of their return home, which will come tomorrow. But when one’s home is Salt Lake City, how wistful can one really get?
No, the main problem is that the Mammoth have run into a couple teams who wouldn’t let them do what they want to do. Opening night against the Avs, getting goalie’d, hey, that happens. The next two games, though, Utah saw mobile defenses that simply wouldn’t allow them to carry the puck into the zone in the way they like.
The Preds and Hawks won’t be good, and have huge warts, but what they do have are blue lines that can skate. Which means they don’t have to back off the blue line when the bevy of Mammoth forwards want to carry the puck into the offensive zone attack. Which means plays can broken up right at the line, and Utah has to start all over again.
Utah isn’t really built to chip and dump pucks behind a defense and then try to win it back along the boards. At least they’re not in the top six. Nick Schmaltz. Clayton Keller, J.J. Peterka, and Dylan Guenther aren’t wingers that are looking to fish and dig pucks out below the goal line to recycle it. In fact, they traded their best forechecker, Josh Doan, for Peterka. They’re more well-built for it in the bottom-six, but aren’t counting on enough goals from the Carcone’s and Crouses of the world to survive that way.
It should be fine. With better matchups at home, and eventually seeing more stationary defenses, there will be more holes. Getting Sean Durzi, Mikhail Sergachev, and Nate Schmidt more involved in zone entries and up the ice will give them more options. But Utah will have to come up with a better Plan B than what we’ve seen in the season’s first three games.
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