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Clayton Keller isn’t the only star forward playing in the Arizona desert.

Sure, Keller is the only Arizona Coyotes player slated to attend the 2023 NHL All-Star Game in Sunrise, FL this weekend. He’s the Coyotes’ leading scorer and their highest-paid player.

The Coyotes undoubtedly hope the likes of Logan Cooley, Dylan Guenther, Barrett Hayton, and Matias Maccelli become full-fledged stars in the coming seasons. Plus, they’re in the running to land prized youngster Connor Bedard at the upcoming 2023 NHL Draft.

By the time Cooley and Co. are running the show in Arizona, Nick Schmaltz may well be plying his trade on another team. Nevertheless, he’s earned more recognition for having reached stardom with the Coyotes in his own way — and in the face of unusual circumstances, having survived a complete roster teardown by the current management group.

Schmaltz, 26, is under contract for the next three seasons after this one at a $5.85 million annual cap hit, a figure that seemed rich when he first signed in 2019 but looks downright meager now.

After setting new career-best marks in 2021–22 with 23 goals and 59 points in 63 games, Schmaltz has picked up where he left off. He has 11 goals and 28 points in 34 games to kick off the 2022–23 season. And below the surface, the numbers look even better.

Schmaltz is averaging a team-leading 2.33 points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 this year. His 48.77 on-ice expected goals percentage ranks second on the Coyotes, behind only Juuso Valimaki (and notably far ahead of Keller, who is much closer to the team average of 42.69).

To put all that more succinctly: Schmaltz scores a lot. He has 34 goals and 87 points in 97 games over the last two seasons, and, more importantly, the Coyotes are a significantly better team with him on the ice than they are without him. He’s become a strong driver in all three zones.

Less than two years ago, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman wrote a column in which he shot down a rumor that the Coyotes would consider buying out the final five years of Schmaltz’s contract. At the time, Schmaltz had just wrapped up a season in which he scored 10 goals and 32 points in 52 games with Rick Tocchet’s low-scoring ‘Yotes. You can bet Schmaltz’s trade value has increased significantly since then.

Playing on the right side of Arizona’s new-look top line with Keller and Hayton, Schmaltz has seven points in his last three games, including a natural hat trick and an assist in the Coyotes’ dominant 5–0 victory over the St. Louis Blues at Mullett Arena on Wednesday.

“Schmaltzy’s so smart, has hockey sense through the roof,” Coyotes head coach Andre Tourigny said in his media availability after Wednesday’s game. “He’s doing a really good job on the PK as well for us, as well as on the power play.

“[He] had never played anywhere else but the flank on the power play, and this year we put either in the bumper or the net-front to have a threat on the inside,” Tourigny continued. “He can adapt in every situation.”

This is Schmaltz’s fifth season with the Coyotes. It’s also the second rebuild he’s been a part of since joining the team. Looking back at his arrival in the desert also offers some clear lessons on how the Coyotes can move forward properly this time.

In November 2018, previous Coyotes general manager John Chayka traded underperforming first-round draft selections Dylan Strome and Brendan Perlini to the Chicago Blackhawks in exchange for Schmaltz, himself the 20th-overall pick in 2014.

As an organization, the ‘Yotes struggled to maintain consistent forward momentum under Chayka’s leadership. Much like the perpetually retooling Vancouver Canucks, the Coyotes have a long history of being stuck in stasis because of shortsighted win-now moves.

While the Strome pick predated Chayka’s tenure, his stalled development on lower lines was very much a consequence of the regime’s aggressive (and ill-fated) attempts to accelerate the team’s winning timeline, perhaps due to off-ice pressures in the market.

The Strome-for-Schmaltz trade clearly exemplified that flawed strategy: Arizona moved a recent top pick who didn’t immediately look like a star for an older, more known quantity. Even though Strome ultimately never reached the level one might expect of a No. 3 pick, the Coyotes passed on trading him for future assets to supplement their rebuild in favor of pursuing a “hockey deal” for an established player. They wanted to get good too soon; Schmaltz was the right player for them at the wrong time.

Chayka’s Coyotes undeniably became a better hockey team soon after Schmaltz entered the fold. They needed to — they had already pushed in their chips by signing captain (and pending UFA) Oliver Ekman-Larsson to a massive eight-year contract in July 2018. In keeping with that trend, the Coyotes inked Schmaltz to a seven-year extension of his own the following March.

Arizona then doled out serious futures to acquire veterans like Phil Kessel and Taylor Hall, moving up to the NHL’s playoff bubble and ultimately qualifying in 2020. But the Schmaltz addition (and keeping Ekman-Larsson) factored heavily into the team advancing out of the basement too quickly, preventing them from being in a position to draft enough top-end talent to become a true contender. The result: mediocrity.

All that is now water under the bridge. Chayka has long since left Arizona, having been replaced in 2020 by former St. Louis Blues assistant GM Bill Armstrong. The Coyotes subsequently embarked upon a full-fledged fire sale to accumulate future assets for another crack at a rebuild, with Schmaltz, Keller, Hayton, and (for now) Chychrun remaining among the few holdovers from the previous era.

The Coyotes are just about right where they want to be right now: 29th in the NHL, with a great crop of young prospects. The future is coming, and Schmaltz might just end up being a part of it after all — granted he hasn’t aged out of the core or been traded by the time the team has amassed enough quality young players to take a step. Both are very real possibilities.

What the Coyotes do with Schmaltz going forward will depend on how their budding young players adjust to the NHL. If they land Bedard and Cooley immediately looks like a difference-maker, Schmaltz might just become the elder statesman of the Coyotes’ new competitive core. But if their 2023 first-round pick looks like more of a project and their existing prospects need more time, Schmaltz might have to go to ensure the team keeps picking high until they hit on a superstar.

That’s the critical exercise: figuring out if the players you have right now are the ones you can win with in the future. If not, your rebuild might be over before it even gets off the ground. It’s a question that might soon need answering in Detroit and Vancouver, where their respective teams haven’t consistently made the playoffs in a long time — but both their captains, once thought to be rebuild centerpieces, are pending UFAs. Sound familiar?

If the Canucks and Red Wings keep Bo Horvat and Dylan Larkin, respectively, they likely won’t be bad enough to make any more high-end draft selections going forward. Of course, the two teams have arrived at this point by different means — the Red Wings have been actively rebuilding, while the Canucks have been stumbling along aimlessly for years — but, for both, re-signing their captain would mean pushing in the chips. Making a “hockey trade,” as has been rumored around Vancouver, wouldn’t be much better, and both Horvat and Larkin will become much harder to move with big extensions. Once you sign those players, it’s difficult to turn back.

Vancouver likely doesn’t have enough young talent to support a winning team if they keep Horvat or elect to make a lateral move. (Incidentally, one of the mistakes the Canucks have made in aspiring to contend was acquiring Ekman-Larsson, effectively undoing the Coyotes’ own shortsightedness). Detroit might have enough talent to make do if it extends Larkin, although its draft history from 2015 to 2018 really hurts its case.

When the Coyotes re-signed Ekman-Larsson and decided Schmaltz bolstered their forward core enough to lead them to contention, they erroneously thought they had enough talent already banked to accelerate out of their rebuild — and they paid for it in their subsequent teardown. That’s the lesson the Red Wings, the Canucks, and other teams can take away from the moves the Coyotes made in the late 2010s: mediocrity is the enemy of any dynasty.

On his own, Schmaltz is a very good player. Based on his production over the last two seasons, you could say he’s a star player. He could be a key player on a championship team someday. If the Coyotes do it right this time and continue taking it slow with their build, Schmaltz could even be part of a contending team in Arizona. But they’d be remiss to try rushing it again with the core they already have.

The Coyotes’ next inflection point is still a few years off. For teams like the Red Wings and Canucks, that date looms much larger on the horizon. It remains to be seen whether those teams will avoid making the same mistakes the Coyotes’ previous management did. Their respective futures could be at stake.

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