When Arizona Coyotes general manager John Chayka acquired center Derek Stepan on June 23, 2017, it seemed like such a great move. He played well during the 2017-18 season and it was looking like he’d be the number two center in Arizona for quite some time. Ladies and gentleman, life comes at you fast.
Derek Stapan had regressed so rapidly that he’s barely in the top nine. It happens to every player, but a twenty-nine-year-old with a $6.5 million cap hit? What exactly happened here?
Best place to start is with Arizona’s acquisition of Stepan. Arizona desperately needed a number one center going into the 2017-2018 season because after trading away Martin Hanzal, the only available option was thirty-two-year-old Brad Richardson. For context, Stepan was coming off of a fifty-five point season in New York, so this move was very good on paper.
As for Stepan’s first season in Arizona, his performance proved that the high quality of the move made to acquire him. Stepan played in all eighty-two games, scored fourteen goals, forty-two assists and fifty-six points. While Stepan scored three less goals than the season prior, he made up for it by recording more assists and points.
He showed he had the tools to be a number one center in this league. Centers need to lead and be true team players. The only aspect of his game that really took a step backwards was his +/-.
In New York the previous season, he posted a +19, but in Arizona, he had a -7. With no further context, this looks like he got lazy defensively, but I attribute it more so to Arizona being an objectively terrible team for half of 2017-18. It wasn’t until the next season that he got lazy defensively.
The 2018-19 season was the worst statistical season of Stepan’s entire career. The lone positive thing that can be said for Stepan in 2018-19 is that he scored one more goal than the previous year. Stepan recorded a career low twenty assists and thirty-five points.
He played in seventy-two games and scored nine less points than the shortened 2012-13 season which he played in only forty-eight games. In late February 2019, Stepan injured his knee in a game against Vancouver. In the eight games he played after returning, he would score two goals and an assist.
He played surprisingly well during that stretch, considering that he was playing with a torn MCL. I find it shocking that he played better while injured than he did before. From the perspective of a critic watching him play every night, Stepan passed lousily, lazily skated up and down the ice and played little to no defence.
Arizona’s defence was one of the best in the league in 2018-19, and as a result of playing with a very good defence and goaltender, Stepan’s lack of defensive production went unnoticed throughout the year. It is technically possible that the ten games he missed were the main reason for the lack of offensive production. The numbers simply don’t back that possibility up because how does missing ten games equate to scoring twenty-one fewer points than the previous year?
Stepan has never been a point per game player. The closest he ever got to achieving that mark was the shortened season where he scored forty-four points in forty-eight games. Six years later and it’s incredibly unlikely that he would’ve scored twenty-one more points in just ten games. What happened to Derek Stepan is that he became a lazy player. You could see it as he skated lazily up and down the ice or threw the puck around wildly when passing.
It’s entirely possible that Stepan just had a single bad year and he would rebound this season. That possibility has officially been ruled out by his performance this season. Despite playing badly in 2018-19, Stepan mostly stayed in the top six on the roster.
This season, however, he was bounced around from the first line all the way to the fourth line. He, like Phil Kessel, never found a consistent spot on the roster, but it was worse for Stepan. A twenty-nine-year-old center with a $6.5M cap hit on a playoff contending team, that spent a not insignificant amount of time in first place in the Pacific Division, scored less than a twenty-three-year-old winger that was picked in the fifth round of the draft.
Derek Stepan was two points away from being knocked out of the top ten scoring players on the Arizona Coyotes last season. That Coyotes team had a single twenty-goal scorer and only two players scored more than forty points. In seventy games, Derek Stepan scored ten goals and eighteen assists for twenty-eight points.
Stepan managed to make the worst season of his entire career blush. He’s a shell of his former self, more comparable to Kevin Porter than any NHL level talent. He can’t shoot, pass or skate well anymore. He plays almost no defence and has zero on ice leadership.
The only thing Arizona can do at this point is throw him on the fourth line where he can’t actively hurt the team next year and wait out the final year of his contract. The best case scenario is Stepan plays out of his mind next season due to it being a contract year. Chayka could easily turn a productive Stepan into a couple of picks at next year’s trade deadline.