What’s wrong with the Mammoth? Explaining the team’s struggles over the last 6 weeks.

After a rocketship start to the season, the Utah Mammoth have fallen back to Earth — hard.

Since the end of October, the Mammoth have just six wins and 16 losses. They’ve gone from atop the Central Division to fifth. And if the playoffs started today (they don’t, not even close), they’d be out of a playoff spot once again. That means, overall, they are performing at a somewhat lower level than last season, despite another year of development.

It’s not all doom and gloom: Just as the hot streak ended quickly, so too could the cold streak. The Mammoth’s players and coaches feel they’re not far away from flipping the switch.

Here’s what you should know about the Mammoth.

The overall picture

The Mammoth are currently fourth in the NHL’s Western Conference wild-card race (remember, two wild-card teams make it from each conference). However, they’re just one point out of a top-two, playoff-qualifying slot.

The Mammoth are fortunate to be in the Western Conference — they’d rank ninth in the wild card in the East. They also have played more games than their competition, which means they rank 27th in the NHL in points per game.

That schedule congestion has played a major role in the Mammoth’s struggles over the last six weeks. Thirteen of those 22 games during the team’s 6-13-3 stretch referenced above were on the road, and the Mammoth have had five sets of back-to-backs in that time. They’re 0-5 in the second night of a back-to-back.

That’s the pessimistic side of their standing. The optimistic counterpart is that the underlying numbers would indicate that the Mammoth should be a league-average team, not a poor one. Here’s where the Mammoth rank in expected goals, both offensively and defensively, per Moneypuck:

The Mammoth are in that “bad” quadrant, yes, but they’re pretty close to league average in expected goals on both sides of the puck. They probably “should” have more wins than they do, but have lost seven of their last eight one-goal games.

One big concern: the power play. Utah ranks 28th in the league in turning power-play situations into goals; they do so just 15% of the time.

Why the struggles?

Part of the issue has been personnel. The team’s biggest ongoing concern is the health of Logan Cooley, who leads the team in goals and the team’s forwards in plus-minus, but is set to miss an “indefinite” period of time after two leg injuries in nasty collisions in short order.

“There’s no other Logan Cooley in our team,” head coach Andre Tourigny said. “So there’s nobody who can be Logan Cooley for the next little while. It’s not the way it is. So everybody has to be themselves, but the best version of themselves.”

The reality is that Cooley’s injury tests Utah’s depth. Kailer Yamamoto and Liam O’Brien have both played in the games since Cooley’s injury, but are generally seen as players who straddle the minor and major league level. The 20-year-old Daniil But has been called up to play a significant role, too.

Depth was already considered a potential weakness of the team, especially in the wake of general manager Bill Armstrong’s two-for-one trade of Michael Kesselring and Josh Doan for JJ Peterka. The deal made sense in a long-term time frame given Peterka’s youth, speed, and the rising Utah prospect core — but the latter has proven not really ready for full NHL action yet. A 20-year-old Dmitriy Simashev, for example, made the team and played well initially, then struggled with consistency before being sent down to Tucson.

Clayton Keller, Dylan Guenther, and, somewhat surprisingly, Nick Schmaltz have been real bright spots. But Barrett Hayton, the former No. 5 overall pick of the 2018 draft, has tumbled in productivity. Brandon Tanev’s numbers are not strong. Over-30 defensemen Ian Cole and Olli Määttä might have lost a step as well.

Some fans’ ire has turned to the team’s goaltending situation. After a career year last season (save percentage: .905), Karel Vejmelka has seemed to revert to his career average save percentage of around .895. New acquisition Vitek Vanecek was brought in as a stopgap solution and has performed like one, with a save percentage of .878. That being said, Utah’s defenders are also giving up great opportunities, so it’s not totally the goaltenders’ fault that pucks are in the net.

In the long term, Utah’s player situation looks strong: Cooley, Guenther, and Keller look like stars, and they have a number of minor-league prospects (like Caleb Desnoyers, Tij Iginla, But, Simashev, and Michael Hrabal) ready to fill these holes in the years to come.

But while the Mammoth wait for those prospects, the weaknesses really show.

Mentality and consistency concerns

The above is probably enough to explain the Mammoth’s slide, but it’s worth noting here that the players themselves have reported a need to improve from a mentality and consistency point of view.

“There’s a brand of hockey that needs to be played,” defenseman Nate Schmidt told the Deseret News after the team lost to the Calgary Flames for the first time in team history. “... It takes the commitment in order to do it. You just have to find whether or not you want to do it.” That sentiment echoed something defenseman Ian Cole said after the team’s loss to Vegas: “We need to really look at our game as a whole and our attitude and how we approach it and whether winning matters to us.”

Both of those players are program newcomers after successful NHL careers elsewhere; they have three Stanley Cups between them. (Not the viral mugs, the championship trophies.) It is somewhat concerning that these outsiders have implored for this higher level of attitude and work ethic from their teammates.

It’s for these reasons that NHL reporter Frank Seravalli said it’s “fair to suggest that head coach Andre Tourigny’s hot seat is getting turned up a bit” on a recent Bleacher Report Insider Notebook. Seravalli also noted that there wasn’t immediate pressure on Tourigny’s job, but that things were getting “a little toasty and uncomfortable” on that hot seat.

Remarkably, Tourigny is the league’s fourth-longest tenured head coach, being hired in 2021.

Even as the team has lost two games this week, players and Tourigny alike have praised the team’s character and effort in the contests, suggesting they don’t feel it’s been the difference in all of those losses. As noted above, there are real reasons to believe aspects of the game outside of Tourigny’s control are responsible for the team’s downturn.

But the situation is definitely worth watching as Utah’s season unfolds, and especially when it comes to an end. The majority of the season is still remaining for Tourigny to make the strongest possible case that he’s the right man to lead the Mammoth forward.