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XFHL 9 Season preview for Coyotes

There hasn't been any changes for Coyotes team after XFHL 8 ended. Only new guy in the roster is Johannes Salmonsson who was drafted in 3rd round. Salmonsson is 18 year old left winger, who was awarded 3 year contract. Coyotes expect him to be valuable player in future, it might take time for him to develope but some day he will be in pro roster too. So there hasn't been any trades for Yotes in offseason, mainly because the management is satisfied with the team performance over past two years. Our team doesn't look the best on paper but the heart is in each game and team chemistry works well. The only thing Coyotes want to change is to add good skilled dman into lineup. A few trade talks has been made but nothing serious yet. Look more from Trade page.

Coyotes XFHL 9 playing roster

Coyotes changed a few players positions before the start of the season and the roster looks like this now:
Centers: Kozlov, Antropov, Armstrong, Korolyuk
Left Wings: Hammer, Hulbig, Connolly, Vrbata
Right Wings: Whitney, Smyth, Donovan, Chubarov
Defencemen: Sydor, Yazykov, Galanov, Patera, Malik, Heid
Goalies: Lasak, Biron
Coyotes have 2 lines that can score but much is expected from 1st line Hammer-Kozlov-Whitney. 3rd and 4th lines are mainly defensive lines. Dmen pair Sydor-Yazykov also should give some extra help for forwards. And for dmen it's easy to play since they know there's Lasak between pipes most of the time. Lasak has showed that he's one of the elite goalies in the league nowadays and likely will remain there many years.

Coyotes goal for this season

Coyotes have a clear goal for XFHL 9, to make playoffs. Team is stronger from last year and when no movements has been made, the team should be able to repeat last year's performance. Homeice advantage isn't easy task in Western Conference, all teams in West have good players so getting top 4 after regular season will be hard but that is still possible for Yotes.

New things in XFHL 9

XFHL has a few new things added for this year, Luxury tax and Endorsements. With Luxury tax Coyotes have no problem, Coyotes salary is over 8 Million under the cap. Of course there's a lot of players with 1 year left in contracts, so the payroll will be a bit higher when new contracts have been made but there's no worries for that matter. Endorsements make more excitiment to the season too. Coyotes signed two contracts, first is to have at least 80 points in regular season, it's not that easy task but if there's no over 80 points it also means no playoffs either so the management is expecting another 90+ season for Yotes. Second contract that Coyotes made has much more risk, they signed a deal where one player from the team must be in top 5 in Enforcer standings. Why did we do this deal? well we have two very physical players in the team, Connolly and Yazykov. Past seasons have showed that they both play very aggressive style of game and get lots of penalties and sometimes get into fights too. It will be interesting to follow how "well" they do in that categoria this year, hopefully one of them is in top 5.