1-on-1 with John Ferguson

Roadrunners General Manager/Arizona Coyotes Assistant General Manager John Ferguson joined Adrian Denny, Kim Cota-Robles and Brett Fera on this week’s edition of Roadrunners Happy Hour. Catch Happy Hour every Tuesday at 5 p.m. on Fox Sports 1450 AM and the Roadrunners Happy Hour Podcast on the iHeartRadio app.

Listen to “Suiting up with John” on Spreaker.

Are you ready to get down to business with both the Roadrunners and Coyotes after the preseason games?

Yeah, we can’t wait to get started. We had a tremendous effort in Henderson on Friday. Give their goaltender some credit and our guys played well, we controlled a lot of the game and we saw some good signs from different players that we are going to rely on this year and guys that are looking to get some time up top.

We have 17 guys returning this year as well as a few new faces that have been in the league for a few years. How are the Roadrunners helping with their development?

Some prime examples of the importance of player development in Tucson were on display on Saturday (at Coyotes preseason game). We’re talking about Michael Carcone, Barrett Hayton, Matias Maccelli and JJ Moser. I think we saw the last of Logan Cooley in Tucson on Saturday (laughs), but it was great to see him there. It was great to get Michael Carcone back to where so much of his development occurred and he took a step forward as a pro. We invested in his future and it’s already paying dividends for us.

Do you think that Tucson fans should get to the games as soon as possible to watch Josh Doan because of how fast he is developing?

I don’t think you’re wrong. He probably couldn’t have had a better rookie tournament. Maybe he expected it, and I can’t say we were overly surprised, but we were very pleased. There were certain aspects when we had our exit meetings last year, we were concise and straight to the point, and he attacked those areas over the summer. It’s great to see when a player takes that feedback and goes to work on it. Give him credit, he’s better off and we’re better off for it. It’s a great example of a guy attacking the off season.

Take us through the summer from about July 1st through July 10th. What were you looking for as far as pieces to add to the organization and the overall depth? What was the plan?

We want to be a team that’s hard to play against, that can produce, stays out of the box, I’ll preach mean and clean, but also a team that provides depth and capable depth for the big team in Arizona. We have a number of players that can do that, we can look to a number of our players now that can come up for short periods and we can grow them into full-time Coyotes. We preach healthy internal and external competition to push young players to get better. We know we can’t look at them right out of the gate, but I expect them to be confident when they get here. We understand as a group that it is a really competitive division.

How valuable is it to have someone like Matt Villalta who has significant AHL experience while things are happening not only with our organization but also league wide?

We definitely looked at Villalta’s time in the American Hockey League, with Ontario, and his time in Juniors. We did identify him as a potential candidate if he was going to be a free agent this summer. We knew LA had done some things, depth wise, on their side that might leave him available in free agency. We didn’t take long to move on that, and we’re happy to have him. Yes, he came here to compete for the net along with Ivan. We weren’t completely caught unaware. (Ivan Prosvetov was claimed off of waivers by Colorado on Monday.) We knew about Ivan’s status for many months, and we still wanted him to be one of our depth guys. We’ve benefited greatly from the waiver wire in the past few years, a few years ago with (Scott ) Wedgewood and this past year with (Connor) Ingram. We understand the opportunities and challenges with that. We’re happy we have Matt in place, we’ve got Anson Thornton who’s 20-years-old, unsigned. He’s still got an opportunity to go back to juniors as an overage player but if needed; and if healthy he is an option for us. We are actively looking at and considering replacement solutions and we have been doing so for the last few days.

Is there any player that you see with Tucson this year that you think is going to have a breakout season? Who steps out for you on that front?

I can give you a number of names. I will share with you John Leonard, who we signed as a free agent. We think that there may be some version of Michael Carcone in his game. Where he’s now on his third organization at the NHL and American League level, he’s exhibited great scoring skill as a college player. Can he find his way? It’s interesting, we were having different discussions with Jan Jenik and others on our team and amongst our players. Jan has played just about 110 games so far for his career at the American Hockey League level but you look at others that have taken longer to break through: Micheal Bunting, Hudson Fasching, Michael Carcone, Jonathan Marchessault. Those last four names averaged 300 American League games played. That’s why I give you the name Leonard when you think is there one player? I could give you many more, but I think that example is one for our fans to look at and there may be some similarity, but we’ll see.