The Arizona Coyotes had their share of struggles, but goalie Mike Smith's play wasn't one of them. This 2012 story chronicled his massive impact on the Coyotes' performance.
The former Phoenix/Arizona Coyotes – whose players and hockey operations staff relocated to Utah for the 2024-25 season – experienced more than their share of disappointments.
But in this major feature story from The Hockey News’ May 28, 2012, edition (Volume 65, Issue 25), senior writer Ken Campbell profiled veteran goalie Mike Smith as he established himself as one of the best netminders in franchise history.
(This is our daily reminder to you: for access to The Hockey News’ exclusive Archive, you can go to THN.com/Free and subscribe to the magazine.)
Smith joined the Coyotes in 2011 and played very well, finishing fourth in voting for the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s best goaltender and leading Phoenix to a Western Conference final appearance in 2012. While he struggled with consistency before joining the ‘Yotes, Smith proved he was about as solid as any goalie got in his era.
“Anyone who is saying Mike Smith was on the scrap heap is completely misplaced,” said Smith’s agent, Kurt Overhardt. “Whoever is telling that story is living in a fantasy land.”
Smith’s playing career lasted until 2022, and he wound up appearing in 670 regular-season NHL games, going 299-263-78. He didn’t win a Stanley Cup, but he did impress Coyotes goalie coach and longtime netminder Sean Burke.
“He has raised the bar and the expectations for him will be compared to what he’s doing now,” Burke said of Smith. “But this is him. He gets it now. This is the type of player he’s capable of being.”
THE PHOENIX RISES
Vol. 65, No. 25, May 28, 2012
By Ken Campbell
We come bearing very exciting news. After an exhaustive search, your humble correspondents at The Hockey News have finally located The Scrap Heap, that place where NHL GMs pick over spare parts and broken dreams looking for bargains. We received a tip a couple of years ago that it was located behind the St-Hubert in Drummondville, Que. Not there. We looked everywhere from the Jersey Turnpike to the massive tract of farmland across from Scotiabank Place in Ottawa, to no avail. But there it was, hidden in plain view among the palm trees in the parking lot of the St. Pete Times Forum.
At least that’s where it was last season. It was from that locale that Mike Smith tearfully called his parents last February to tell them he’d been sent down to the minors by the Tampa Bay Lightning. He had cleared waivers earlier that day, meaning there wasn’t a team willing to take on the $769,000 in cap space he would have cost for the rest of 2010-11. When he passed through again on re-entry waivers three weeks later, it was an even more damning indictment. Any team in the league could have had Smith for just $266,000 as an insurance policy for the stretch run. All 29 of them took a pass. “I honestly thought at that point I was done and would probably never play again,” Smith recalled. “All the worst things go through your mind at a time like that.”
It was from this morass the Phoenix Coyotes rescued Smith. And in return, Smith has since given the Coyotes Vezina Trophy-caliber-GMs-voting-be-damned goaltending. There is good, great and other-worldly and for most nights, Smith fit the profile of the last one. His .930 save percentage tied him for best in the league with Henrik Lundqvist among goalies who played 40 or more games.
But even more importantly, unlike last season when the Lightning couldn’t count on Smith to win games and instead turned to a 41-year-old senior citizen in Dwayne Roloson, the Coyotes handed their fate to Smith and he delivered. With five games to go in the regular season, the Coyotes were in ninth place in the Western Conference. Smith pitched three straight shutouts, stopped 190 of 192 shots and backstopped a five-game winning streak that vaulted the Coyotes to the top of the Pacific Division and into the third seed. In the first round against the Chicago Blackhawks, his save percentage was a mortal .950 and despite being run over by Andrew Shaw in Game 2 of the series he was the Coyotes’ best player.
Going into the playoffs, Coyotes captain Shane Doan said there was no team in the league that relied on one player more than the Coyotes relied on Smith. That was certainly the case through the first round and the first two games of the second round, considering the Coyotes were averaging 27.8 shots per game, but were giving up a whopping 39.5. Against the Blackhawks, the Coyotes were outshot on average by almost 14 a game.
These are indeed rarefied heights for a player who was supposedly plucked off our aforementioned Scrap Heap last summer. At least that’s the story, and, hey, it’s a really good one. It represented a marriage between a down-and-outer staring down the barrel of the end of his career and a team that is a ward of the NHL state. A team on a shoestring budget signing a player hanging onto his career by his fingernails. Desperate to replace Ilya Bryzgalov in goal, the Coyotes threw a lifeline to Smith and he grabbed it.
But his agent, Kurt Overhardt, isn’t buying it. Makes for a great tale, he says, but he claims his client had five offers on the table, including one from the Lightning. It came in just hours before free agency and was for a significant haircut, but it was one of a handful of opportunities Smith had to consider before settling on a two-year, $4-million deal in Phoenix. “Anyone who is saying Mike Smith was on the scrap heap is completely misplaced,” Overhardt said. “Whoever is telling that story is living in a fantasy land.”
As it turned out, all Smith needed was to be loved. When the Coyotes called Overhardt July 1, they made it clear to him Smith was the man they wanted and he would be the undisputed No. 1 goalie. They must have seen something in his .899 save percentage last season that nobody else did. But Smith had a past with Coyotes coach Dave Tippett in Dallas, a kindred spirit in goaltending coach Sean Burke and a GM in Don Maloney who trusted his instincts.
In fact, Burke acknowledges he has no idea what Plan B would have been had the Coyotes not landed Smith. If you’ll recall, the unrestricted free agent crop was not exactly bursting with goaltenders and the Coyotes identified Smith as their target right after the draft. What they saw was a 6-foot-4 specimen who, with a few tweaks to his game, they felt could develop into one of the top five goalies in the league. And that is exactly what Smith did, largely because even after a bad outing he knew he had the confidence of his team and he’d be back in the blue paint to start the next game, even if he didn’t agree with the decision.
By all accounts, Smith is quite a normal guy by goaltending standards – well liked by his teammates and not a sullen loner – but it’s clear he needed some major work on his self-esteem by the time he got to the Coyotes. “There were times this year when I probably didn’t deserve to go in and I was almost begging Burkie not to go back in because I felt like I was letting the team down,” Smith said. “And he was like, ‘No, you’re going right back in there. That’s what No. 1 goalies do.’”
Smith found it difficult to get that feeling in Tampa Bay, particularly last season. He said he doesn’t remember starting a game after a loss under Lightning coach Guy Boucher, which had him more focused on the result than the process, a surefire recipe to screw up even if you’re playing in the best league in the world. In reality, during Boucher’s first season in 2009-10, Smith lost a total of 25 games and followed up a loss with a start in the next game in 11 of them. But last season, he started in the next game only once after each of his seven losses.
In the Lightning’s defense, it’s not as though the hockey world had thought GM Steve Yzerman had lost his mind when he cut Smith loose. And it’s not as though Smith even made Boucher’s decisions all that difficult. In five of those seven 2010-11 losses, he allowed at least four goals and was pulled twice. Let’s face it, when a guy gets shelled and then pulled halfway through an 8-1 loss, what are you telling your team if you go right back to him the next game? “I probably would have let me go, too,” Smith said. “I wasn’t the guy they needed. They gave me an opportunity to play and I didn’t take that opportunity.”
He was, however, the guy the Lightning could have used this season. The same team that came within a goal of going to last year’s Stanley Cup final flamed out spectacularly in 2011-12, in large part because the Lightning learned that banking on a 42-year-old goalie was not a great idea.
Smith admits that from time to time he thinks about how he showed them, “but I haven’t said it to too many people.”
Smith has endured because of his mental outlook, which doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for resentment and grudge holding. Evidently, it doesn’t have a good sense of recall, either. That’s a good thing considering the way things went in Smith’s first game with his new team. After being handed the keys to the kingdom, Smith went out on opening night and was almost as bad as the 18 players in front of him, allowing six goals on 38 shots in the first two periods against the San Jose Sharks. Included in them was a back-door play by Michal Handzus where Smith looked rather clueless and one from a questionable angle off the stick of Sharks rookie Andrew Desjardins. In fact, of the four goals Desjardins scored this season, two of them were in that game.
But it was what Smith did in the third period that had the Coyotes excited about the possibilities. After doing the skate of shame out to his crease to start the final frame, Smith stopped all 14 shots he faced. He followed that up with a 2-1 shootout loss before getting his first win as a Coyote, Oct. 15, in the team’s fourth game.
“When that game ended, I felt every bit as good about what we had done bringing him in, if not better, because of the way that game went,” Burke said. “We were terrible that night, it was one of the worst games our team played all year. But for Mike, when that game ended, he had shown me a lot about what we believed we were getting. When he came in, more than anything he was a little fragile, but when I left that night, my first thought was, ‘There’s a guy who showed the kind of character we expected.’”
And from there, it was simply a matter of doing two things. The first was convincing Smith he had the chops to not only be a No. 1 netminder, but to be the one of the elite goalies in the league. Check. The second was to take advantage of his size by having him play deeper in his net. The natural tendency for a lot of goalies is to get out of the net and challenge shooters, but that leaves them vulnerable to dekes and wraparounds. Why do that if you’re 6-foot-4 and can cover up most of the net, anyway?
By playing deeper, it allows Smith to hug the post more and not make himself susceptible to being beaten by deft stickhandlers and speedsters. Smith gives Burke an enormous amount of credit for his success and Burke is probably most responsible for the technical and mental improvements Smith has made. It helps that Smith skates better than most goalies and can read plays.
He’s also an outstanding athlete. As a youngster, Smith was as good a softball player as he was a hockey player. Playing in Kingston, Ont., near his hometown of Verona, Smith’s teams won seven Ontario championships and two national titles and in 2001 he had to turn down an opportunity to play in the World Junior Softball Championship in Australia because it conflicted with the Ontario League playoffs. For most of his childhood, he caught one of the best young softball pitchers in the world in Blake Orr, who also played in the OHL for the Mississauga IceDogs and Belleville Bulls. Burke saw a little of him-self in Smith and was successful in convincing him that with his athletic ability and size there was no reason why Smith could not be one of the top goaltenders in the league.
(Smith is also an off-season disciple of former NHLer Gary Roberts and his torture chamber, er, gym. That, of course, makes him a physical specimen whether or not he can stop the puck.) “To me, there’s never a save that you can’t make,” Burke said. “If the goalie puts him in a position where he had no chance, that’s probably true. But to me, I want Mike to put himself in a position where he has a chance to make every save, no matter if it’s a three-on-none breakaway or a backdoor play or a shot from the point. He has to be in position to have a chance to make every save.”
And Smith has been making the vast majority of them. When the Coyotes announced they had signed Smith, Burke said he got a number of calls and text messages from people around the NHL congratulating him on securing a backup goalie. And to be fair, Smith had done little to that point in his career to prove he was anything more than that. But sometimes the stars simply align properly.
The Coyotes couldn’t afford to keep Bryzgalov and needed to find more of what they already had, hungry guys eager to prove themselves. Smith turned 30 in March, meaning he could just be entering his wheelhouse when it comes to his most productive years in the NHL. It certainly took him a bit of time to mature, but that he has, in part because he and his wife, two-time Canadian Olympic skier Brigitte Acton, now have a son, 10-month-old Aksel.
Smith met Acton in 2007 when he was Marty Turco’s backup with the Dallas Stars. Turco was holding a celebrity golf tournament in his hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., and fellow ‘Soo’ native Acton was playing in the group ahead of Smith’s. It was one of those slow days on the golf course and Smith and Acton crossed paths when Smith drilled one of his monster drives into the woods. While searching for his ball in the fescue, he struck up a conversation with Acton. “I had a lot of time to tell her what I was all about,” Smith said. “She fell for it.”
Smith is actually almost as quick with a quip as he is with his glove hand. When pressed about his change in style this season, he responded by saying: “If I told you everything, I’d have to kill you.”
Later in the conversation, he took credit for Steven Stamkos’s emergence as the best goal-scorer in the NHL. Stamkos, who lived two doors down from Smith in Tampa, remains close friends with him and Smith said it was because of him that Stamkos is a perennial Rocket Richard Trophy contender. “When I was there, he was lighting me up in practice every day, blowing them all by me, so he had an overabundance of confidence when he went on the ice that he was going to score.”
With the way Smith is playing, it’s time for him to be a little less self-deprecating. Talk is beginning to surface about him being considered for Canada’s 2014 Olympic team in Sochi, which is a testament to his play, though a pretty telling statement on the decline of Canadian goaltending, too. It’s also a pretty solid indication that when it comes to goaltending in the NHL, everyone is pretty much guessing these days. Who would have thought Smith would put a year like this one together after the way he played last season or Bryzgalov would go to Philadelphia and be so wildly inconsistent?
After all, Smith has had just one spectacular season. The Coyotes claim they didn’t put much stock in his subpar play in 2010-11, which would then lead you to believe Smith will have to repeat his performance next campaign before he converts the skeptics into true believers.
Bob Gainey once said that just because a player had one bad season doesn’t mean he’ll have two. If that’s the case, wouldn’t the same go for one good season? But Burke believes this is no anomaly. “He has raised the bar and the expectations for him will be compared to what he’s doing now,” Burke said. “But this is him. He gets it now. This is the type of player he’s capable of being.”
The Hockey News Archive is an exclusive collection of more than 2,640 issues and more than 156,000 articles exclusively produced for subscribers, chronicling the full history of The Hockey News from 1947 until this day. Visit the archive at THN.com/archive and subscribe today at subscribe.thehockeynews.com