The Arizona Coyotes' Blueprint to Win the Race for Connor McDavid

For much of the year, the race for last overall and the best odds of landing the 2015 first overall pick has been a two-team affair. The Edmonton Oilers got off to a wretched start that gave them an early lead, and then the Buffalo Sabres went 14 straight without a point to make themselves the favourites.

If there’s a third team in the mix, it is the Arizona Coyotes. They’ve been near the bottom of the league for most of the year, and while they’ve been bad, the potential is there for them to get much worse.

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The biggest move, trading Devan Dubnyk out of town, has already been made. The Coyotes were a lovely 9-5-2 with him in the crease and a wretched 11-26-5 without him. With Dubnyk bound for free agency this summer, Mike Smith signed long term at big money, and the season already sunk by the time the former had wrested the starting job away from the latter, dealing him away was a logical move.

The question of course is whether the trade came too late; if we extrapolate Arizona’s non-Dubnyk record the team would be neck-and-neck with Buffalo rather than in front by a significant margin.

More is to come, though.

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Antoine Vermette, who leads all Coyotes forwards in both points and ice time, is a pending free agent and a prime candidate for a trade in the next few weeks. In an interview last week with TSN’s Darren Dreger, Vermette seemed resigned to a trade, even admitting that he was excited about the opportunity. Dreger described interest in the pivot as “strong and varied” and named six teams believed to be in pursuit of the veteran pivot.

Normally, No. 2 centre Martin Hanzal would help ease the pain, but news came last week that he would have surgery to correct a nagging problem with his back. Arizona general manager Don Maloney told Dave Vest of the team website that he likely would be out for the year.

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“Marty is going to have a procedure on his back next week, which will put him week-to-week and in all likelihood finish his season,” Maloney told Vest. “The good thing is he’ll have time to recover and we’ll get him back as soon as possible. The likelihood of him returning this season is remote but we do anticipate a full recovery.”

The Coyotes could lose plenty of other players along the way, too. Keith Yandle, who has a year and a bit left on his contract, has been discussed or rumoured as a possibility all year; dealing him now would allow Arizona to avoid the depreciation that comes with trading a player only one year away from free agency.

Most of those linked reports also include the name of pending free agent Zbynek Michalek as a cheaper alternative for a team looking for a depth defender. If both players are moved, that would eliminate half of the Coyotes' top two pairings and leave Michael Stone as the club’s de facto No. 2 rearguard.

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Add in a couple of support players bound for free agency—top-six winger Martin Erat, energetic B.J. Crombeen—to the trade mix, and Maloney could end up totally decimating a team that really wasn’t all that good to begin with. The Coyotes have dropped four straight; it doesn’t take much imagination to know what removing some of the club’s most useful players will do.

The question is whether that would be enough to get Arizona into the mix for 30th overall. As of this writing, the bottom end of the NHL standings looked like this:

• 27. Carolina Hurricanes: 56 games, 47 points
• 28. Arizona Coyotes: 58 games, 47 points
• 29. Edmonton Oilers: 58 games, 42 points
• 30. Buffalo Sabres: 57 games, 36 points

With the Oilers playing better of late, the five-point gap between Arizona and Edmonton likely isn’t insurmountable; it’s the difference between two wins plus an overtime loss and three losses. With 25 games left on the schedule, it should be attainable, particularly since the Coyotes already have an inferior goal differential to the Oilers.

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Buffalo is a tougher opponent to match. The Sabres have won just three games in the last two months (3-21-2 over that span) and, like the Coyotes, have a long list of free agents that they can dump for draft picks prior to the trade deadline. With 11 points already separating the two clubs and only 20-odd games left to go in the season, Arizona would need the NHL's worst team to catch some unexpected wind in its sails.

In other words, any Arizona plan to land Connor McDavid is probably going to involve finishing 29th and getting some help from the lottery balls.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com, salary information via NHLNumbers.com.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.