Opening Night!

The NHL season is here. First up: the Chicago Blackhawks, who went 4-0 against us last year. Bedard is out with a shoulder injury, but Patrick Kane is back and Frondell, their third overall pick from last year’s draft, is on the roster too.

On our side, with several new faces in the room, here was the opening-night lineup.

Among the young prospects, Simashev and But both made the roster! Both looked good in the preseason, so I’m excited. And on the veteran side, Trocheck slots onto the first line while Lee gets to play alongside Cools and Gunner, the young stars this franchise is built on.

Last season we got into the playoffs through the wild card, but the swings across the year were violent, and this was not yet a team built to win a series. Inconsistency, a poor faceoff percentage, not enough power play goals, no presence at the net front, careless mistakes in the D zone, closing out games — the list of things to fix was long. Now you have a young, inexperienced team with veterans added to it, and the question is how much of that list has actually been addressed.

The Delta Center has been renovated and the atmosphere in there is fantastic. The rake gets steeper and steeper as you climb toward the sixth level. The broadcast was on ESPN, so no Matt McConnell and Dominic Moore, which is a shame — but I was buzzing regardless. Then the anthem. This singer is good. I got genuinely emotional.

And then, finally, the opening faceoff.

The Mammoth opened with the third line out there, which read to me as a statement: we are going to come at you physically, all night.

From the drop they came in waves in the Chicago end, hurricane-level pressure that never let up, generating chance after chance and simply overwhelming them. Can they really hold this pace for sixty minutes? Are we about to get one of those second periods from last season where everything goes quiet? The worries crept in. On the first line, Keller was razor sharp. And the pressure coming off the third and fourth lines was something else. Big. Strong. Nobody enjoys playing against that.

The game broke open, inevitably, through this man. Our sniper. A Guenther snipe. That’s three straight opening nights with a goal. Our guy is something else. He just casually does the exact thing the fans are hoping for. The guy shows up when it matters.

The Mammoth controlled it from start to finish and won it 6-0, with a franchise record thrown in: fourteen players on the scoresheet. Two power play goals. The Schmaltz, Lee and But goals were all born out of presence at the net front. Faceoffs came in at an astonishing 72%! Headlined by Trocheck going 11-for-14 — 79%!! Cools, who struggled in the dot all last season, went 7-for-10 for 70%. The pace dipped a little in the third and we spent more time defending, but Veggie was excellent and we closed it out without conceding. Taken together, this was a game where you could see last season’s problems actually being worked on.

The best part was that the pressure never stopped. Forty-two hits! It’s one game, I know, but this team’s identity — speed and pressure — already looks clear to me. And the core of it might be the bottom six. Crouse, McBain, Stenlund and But forechecking relentlessly with all that size. Carcone works tirelessly in among them. We’ve got Spicy Tuna and Yamamoto in there too, so you can rotate bodies through the bottom six and keep that storm blowing all season long. That’s the feeling I got.

The defense held them off the board, so the result speaks for itself, but there were a lot of careless mistakes in our own zone and I’d like to see that cleaned up. The Peeke–Simashev pair is enormous! That one feels like it could work.

The intensity was high enough that you start to wonder whether it’s sustainable over a full season. It’s one game, so it’s far too early to judge, but this was an opener that gives you every reason to be excited. Trocheck and Lee didn’t look like new arrivals at all — the chemistry already seems to be there.

The first shutout at home in the renovated Delta Center coming on opening night feels like a very good omen. And with a game that good, the atmosphere in the building was perfect. Watching it on TV, all I could think was how incredible it would be to feel that in person — my urge to get back to the Delta Center went up considerably.

Now comes a stretch on the road. Get through that and we’re off to a great start to the season. I think a Mammoth storm might be coming.

Guenther’s getting 50, right?