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Antti Raanta handled injuries Travis Konecny Jersey , a scorpion infestation and a minor car wreck in his first year as a starting NHL goaltender.Battling through all that earned him a three-year contract that makes him the Arizona Coyotes‘ franchise goalie for the foreseeable future. Raanta is scheduled to earn $12.75 million over the life of the deal that keeps him under contract through the 2020-21 season.The 28-year-old Raanta is 21-16-6 with a 2.24 goals-against average and .930 save percentage in 46 games after three separate injuries threatened to derail his season. In 140 career games that included backing up with the Chicago Blackhawks and New York Rangers, the Finn has a 2.30 GAA and .922 save percentage.”He stops the puck,” general manager John Chayka said on a conference call Friday. ”He just seems to, when he’s on, he’s locked in and he’s reading everything and making the game look easy. You put up his numbers both this season and over his career, he’s a high, high-end goaltender in terms of stopping the puck.”Raanta would have been an unrestricted free agent this summer. Instead, he’s glad to be in Arizona long term and hopes to earn another big contract when this one expires at age 32.”I want to be playing a lot, I want to be playing at a really good level all the time and I want to get us in the playoff picture and I want to be successful in there, also,” Raanta said. ”I think getting the three-year deal Adam Cracknell Jersey Womens , it’s perfect for everybody right now.”With Raanta playing well and improvements under first-year coach Rick Tocchet, Arizona is 16-8-2 since Feb. 12 after losing 42 of its first 55 games. Raanta is 9-1-0 with a 1.30 GAA and .959 save percentage and two shutouts in his past 10 appearances.That’s the play Chayka expected when the Coyotes acquired Raanta and center Derek Stepan from the New York Rangers last offseason in a trade that meant giving up the seventh overall pick and defensive prospect Anthony DeAngelo.Tocchet said last month that he wished Raanta came into training camp in better shape, something Chayka alluded to.”I have lots of confidence that he’s going to commit himself to being an NHL starter: taking care of your body and doing the right things to play 60-plus games,” Chayka said. ”I think this year was a great learning experience for him. I think he’s a dedicated guy. I think he’s understood what it takes now on a personal level for himself, what it’s like to be a starter.”Raanta believes he can adjust his offseason preparations to be more prepared to go next season and beyond.”I think it was kind of a growing process for me also – the first year playing a lot, being the No. 1 guy and it’s a big mental adjustment from being a backup to start playing more,” Raanta said. ”It’s going to be good for me to know what it takes to play lots of games and it’s going to be good for me to kind of see what I need to do more in the summertime, what I want to improve, and come back stronger next year.”— SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) With the top three teams in the Eastern Conference all coming out of the Atlantic Division, there’s a good chance the second and third best teams in the East will play in the first round for the second straight year.That imbalance has led some to push to abandon the division playoff format and go back to seeding teams one through eight by conference. Why stop there?The minor league that brought 3-on-3 overtime to hockey more than a decade before the NHL followed suit is adding a new innovation this season for the playoffs.The Southern Professional Hockey League will use a ”pick your opponent” playoff format Wayne Simmonds Jersey , with the first-place team choosing its first-round opponent from the teams that finished from fifth to eighth place, then the second- and third-place teams makes their choices before the final two teams get matched up. In the second round, teams will be matched by regular-season points.SPHL President Jim Combs said he decided to bring this format to his 10-team league after a conversation with an executive from Austria’s Erste Bank Eishockey Liga, which already uses it.”I immediately knew this was the greatest idea I’d ever heard,” Combs said. ”The person at the top earns the right to pick the weakest of the bottom four. He can base it on travel, he can base it on difficulty of opponent, how the guy has been playing the past three or four weeks. A lot of times, you don’t want the eighth-place team because that’s the guy who has hustled and played hard and put the team together the last two or three weeks of the season. That’s the hot team.”Combs said most teams started the year with thoughts of following the old format of picking the team with the fewest points as the opponent. But as the season has gone on, Combs said teams seem more open to picking what they believe is best matchup.Calgary coach Glen Gulutzan said if the format was used in the NHL, he’d probably make it known he’d pick the lowest seed available in any case.”The first thing that comes to my mind is all of us coaches are paranoid,” Gulutzan said. ”So to actually have to pick somebody Womens Bryan Rust Jersey , you think immediately we’ve given them some fuel in a playoff series, right, like: `Oh yeah, they picked us.”’To add even more intrigue, the SPHL will broadcast the selection show at the end of the season so fans and teams can watch live as the matchups are chosen and the extra motivation is created for whoever is picked as the most desirable playoff opponent.”I think there would be some bulletin board material,” said Columbus defenseman Ian Cole, who won the Stanley Cup the past two seasons with Pittsburgh. ”I think that would certainly fire a team up if you’re picking them because you think you could beat them.”Dallas general manager Jim Nill agrees with that sentiment, saying ”it might be great for their league, but it’s not something I’d encourage our league to do and I couldn’t see it ever happening.”Others are more intrigued by the idea, pointing to the unfairness last year that had Pittsburgh and Columbus matched up in the first round despite finishing with the second and fourth most points in the league, respectively.”It sounds like a great idea Josh Jooris Jersey Womens ,” Buffalo backup goalie Chad Johnson said. ”I mean, why not if you’re in first place you should have that choice of who you want to play? It gives you that advantage regardless, because sometimes the eighth-place team, you might have struggled against them, right?”Combs said he has heard from executives from other minor leagues, NHL teams and a few people from the NHL league office about the new format and hopes it will become more widespread after people see the added drama it creates even if there is some initial hesitation.”In 2004, when we started 3-on-3 overtime, everyone laughed at us and said `Hey this will never happen at the top level,”’ Combs said. ”We played it for 10 years and the NHL adopted it, they’re playing it, they revamped the All-Star Game. They have totally embraced it. Will the NHL take this? They might. I don’t know why after all this excitement every sport wouldn’t do it.”GAME OF THE WEEKPittsburgh at Toronto on Saturday. Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews has been sidelined since Feb. 22 with an apparent shoulder injury but could be ready to return this weekend for a showdown against Sidney Crosby and the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins. Even if Matthews can’t go Melker Karlsson Jersey , this is still an intriguing game between two Cup contenders.LEADERSThrough Tuesday’s games: Goals: Alex Ovechkin (Washington), 40; Assists: Jakub Voracek (Philadelphia) and Blake Wheeler (Winnipeg), 57; Points: Nikita Kucherov (Tampa Bay), 86; Wins: Andrei Vasilevskiy (Tampa Bay), 39; Goals-against average: Carter Hutton (St. Louis), 2.02; Save percentage: Hutton, .934.—AP Hockey Writers Larry Lage in Detroit and John Wawrow in Buffalo, New York, contributed to this report.—