Prospective Look at Phoenix

There's way too much reason not to be excited about the prospects that the Coyotes are shuffling in their deck. Bringing Kyle Turris up to the big club for three games before the end of the season was a nice little hello for the third overall draft pick in 2007 and now he gets to suit up for Team Canada (with teammates Shane Doan & Ed Jovanovski) at the World Championships that start this Friday. Very exciting! Even Peter Mueller and Keith Ballard will be playing in the tourney for the United States, while Martin Hanzal will dress for the Czech Republic. If you didn't get to see much of the Coyotes during the season, you'll be able to keep up with a good number of them at this tournament.

The Coyotes boast one of the most solid bluelines at the moment and five of them are already returning to the team next season. The five defensemen listed below are all big minute-loggers for the Coyotes and this sort of depth should keep the team afloat, in case of injuries.

The long-term signings of Shane Doan and Ilya Bryzgalov during the season give the team direction when they add young players to the mix and now they have a great core of players and it's all at a reasonable price as well. The 13 players below have an estimated cost of $32.5 million for next season, which may go up, according to Turris' actual salary figure.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Shane Doan	Ed Jovanovski	Ilya Bryzgalov
Peter Mueller	Derek Morris	Mikael Tellqvist
Steve Reinprecht	Keith Ballard
Martin Hanzal	Zbynek Michalek
Daniel Winnik	Nick Boynton
Kyle Turris

As you can tell, the Coyotes have many holes to fill on the forward lines, as they have a lot of players from their end of season roster are going to become free agents come July 1st. Among those are Radim Vrbata (unrestricted), Mike York (unrestricted), Niko Kapanen (unrestricted), Marcel Hossa (restricted, arbitration) and Daniel Carcillo (restricted).

What should be on the Coyotes wish list should include the likes of a veteran centre that could end up playing up on the second or third line with some of their youth, who would come at a reasonable cost, to keep up appearances. Names like Doug Weight, Craig Conroy, Vaclav Prospal or Brendan Morrison all come to mind, if you were to start naming names. It should almost be expected to see Phoenix in the mid-range market for forwards come the Frenzy.

As for Draft Day, they will choose in the 8th spot come June. They'll more than likely try and fill one of their forward spots in the minors for future use, instead of pulling a player who can make the jump right away. The Coyotes are very young as it is, having one of the younger cores in the league. Of the other teams already done with a Prospective Look, only Columbus has a younger core of players.