How last year’s injuries affected the Utah Mammoth’s strategy this summer

Utah started its inaugural NHL season with plenty of top defensemen, but before long there seemed to be more of them in the medical staff’s office than on the ice.

Those injuries necessitated a few in-season moves. GM Bill Armstrong acquired Olli Määttä through a trade with Detroit, followed by periodic waiver claims of Dakota Mermis and Nick DeSimone.

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He also recalled Maveric Lamoureux, Kevin Connauton, Maksymilian Szuber and Patrik Koch from the AHL as needed, but still, there rarely seemed to be enough defensemen.

This year, Armstrong set out in free agency to correct that problem before it arises. He now has 10 defensemen on the roster who are expected to play in the NHL this year:

• Mikhail Sergachev

• John Marino

• Sean Durzi

• Nate Schmidt

• Olli Määttä

• Nick DeSimone

• Scott Perunovich

• Maveric Lamoureux

• Dmitri Simashev

Will the Utah Mammoth defensemen have any injuries to start the season?

The natural inclination is to wonder if someone is expected to miss time at the beginning of the year due to injury. Marino, for example, missed the last five games of the year with an upper-body ailment, which may have been the same one that kept him sidelined the entire first half of the season.

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But Armstrong shut that notion down on free agency day.

“No, but I anticipate a highly competitive camp,” he said in response to the question as to whether he anticipated any injuries to his defensemen to start the season.

Armstrong has never been one to mislead the media, so unless something changes during summer training, expect Marino and the rest of the blue liners to be healthy at training camp.

“You have to remember: In the NHL, everyone says, ‘Oh, you have six great D’ — but it’s really seven,” Armstrong said. “Your seventh D plays 54 games, and when you don’t have that — we had that last year — we don’t want to go through that, where we’re one short, two short or we’re putting young guys in bad situations. I think, by having that type of depth … we’re going to make sure that we have the proper players to go in there without any excuses.”

What will the Utah Mammoth do with all their defensemen?

As nice as it is to have depth, there’s a limit on the number of players a team can have on its NHL roster.

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The respective contract situations of Lamoureux and Simashev allow them to go to the AHL without passing through waivers, but assuming two of the three healthy scratch spots are reserved for forwards, that leaves one defenseman vulnerable to waivers.

Granted, players are much less likely to get claimed off waivers during the preseason than at any other point in the season because that’s when every team is making cuts. If it’s DeSimone or Perunovich that don’t make it, it’s likely that they can pass through waivers safely.

Training camp can always change things, but based on the information that’s available right now, here’s how the Mammoth’s opening night roster could look (don’t put much stock into the specific line combinations, though):

Forwards

• Keller – Cooley – Guenther

• Schmaltz – Hayton – Peterka

• Crouse – McBain – Tanev

• Kerfoot – Stenlund – Carcone

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Defensemen

• Sergachev – Durzi

• Schmidt – Marino

• Cole – Määttä

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