Open season: Utah HC falls to Ducks in preseason game

A relatively even game got out of the Utah Hockey Club’s control at the start of the third period, as the Anaheim Ducks scored two goals in the span of 50 seconds to give them a solid lead on Wednesday.

The Ducks would go on to win 5-2.

Utah Hockey for dummies

NHL goalies are good at stopping pucks. They’re so good, in fact, that you’re unlikely to beat them unless you complicate your shot a bit.

This can take a few different forms. Sometimes, a player will screen the goalie, standing in front of him to block his view while a teammate shoots. Other times, a player will get the goalie moving and try to find a seam through which he can slide the puck.

In Wednesday’s game, the only surefire way to beat either goalie was to tip the puck.

Tipping, also known as deflecting, is when a player touches the puck with his stick while it’s in the air from a teammate’s shot. The puck then changes direction, and most of the time it’s almost impossible for a human being to react quickly enough to save it.

Four of the seven goals in the Utah-Anaheim game came by way of tips.

Utah Hockey for casual fans

Forecheck, backcheck, paycheck. Kailer Yamamoto has secured two of those things.

Am I beating a dead horse with this one? Maybe. But until Yamamoto has an NHL contract, I’ll keep preaching that he belongs in the NHL.

Andre Tourigny has seemed to agree all camp.

“He’s a good NHL player,” the Utah HC coach said. “You get caught looking at the (scoresheet) and looking at his size. If you look, really, at what’s going on on the ice, he wins a lot of battles.”

Yamamoto scored his third goal in the last two games on a beautiful deflection in the first period.

But being a good hockey player involves so much more than scoring goals, and Yamamoto knows that. He frustrated the opponents in the defensive end all game, earning endless praise from commentators Mike Folta and Nick Olczyk.

Tourigny can be untraditional in the sense that he occasionally chooses to use 11 forwards and seven defensemen — a tactic he employed against the Ducks on Wednesday.

That decision can sometimes be due to available personnel or salary cap constraints, but in this situation it’s likely an indication that the team wants another look at specific defensemen before deciding their respective fates.

Wednesday’s lineup included Patrik Koch, Maveric Lamoureux, Vladislav Kolyachonok and Maksymilian Szuber. Those four guys combine for a total of 41 NHL games played, and 39 of them belong to Kolyachonok.

Unless John Marino is somehow ready to go for game one, it’s likely that one of them makes the team out of camp, and it seems like this is where the final decision could be made.

Which of the four guys is most likely to make the team? My guess is Kolyachonok. He played the last four games of the season for the Coyotes, scoring four points as a defenseman.

Management sees Kolyachonok as a large part of the organization’s future, and this is probably the next step for his development.

What’s next?

Utah HC takes Thursday off to rest before their final preseason game — a contest against the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday.

The league is classifying the game as a neutral location matchup even though it’s in Salt Lake City. That’s because it’s at the Maverik Center, rather than the Delta Center. So if you have tickets, don’t show up at the wrong arena.

Why is the Utah HC game at the Maverik Center? Well, the game was scheduled before the decision came about to move the Arizona Coyotes to Utah. It’s not a test of the Maverik Center’s capacity to hold NHL games or anything like that.

The game starts at 5 p.m. MDT and will be streamed on Utah HC+, but not on cable TV.