The Arizona Coyotes selected Brendan Perlini twelfth overall in the 2014 NHL Entry Draft.

He was one of the biggest kids drafted. Standing at 6 foot 2 and around 212 lbs, he’s got the build to be a solid power forward in the future; on a team that was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the diminutive Max Domi, adding more size was crucial. Last June, Christian Dvorak hadn’t gone on his impressive regular season run with Domi and 2015 prospect Mitch Marner, adding more size to the lineup. Last June, Philip Samuelsson hadn’t been acquired to add bulk on the blue line — neither had Klas Dahlbeck. Neither Lucas Lessio nor Henrik Samuelsson seemed NHL ready (although both are dangerously close), and Ryan MacInnis was still a bit of a wild card with the Kitchener Rangers.

One of the few skaters from the 2014 draft class who was potentially NHL ready last season, Perlini had it all. Despite having all the size and strength to play a power forward role as a top six winger, his speed was still described as his primary asset — with seventy-one points in only fifty-eight regular season OHL games his draft year, he didn’t look like a skater who could benefit too much more from another year in the major juniors. A smart skater and surprisingly mature, he would have quickly found a home in the Coyotes lineup.

A broken hand in the pre-season squashed those thoughts fairly quickly, though.

It took Perlini nearly thirty games to work his way back from hand surgery; by that point, he’d lost his spot on Team Canada’s roster at the World Junior Championships, and was back with the Niagara Ice Dogs for the remainder of the season. The Coyotes were struggling, so bringing him on — especially when the youth movement had been pushed back a season — would have been counterproductive.

He put up better stats than even the season before, exploding onto the scene with a ridiculous forty points in his first twenty-six contests back on the ice.

To put that in perspective — Connor McDavid, first overall draft phenom, had twenty-five points in thirty games.

Perlini’s production tapered off a bit from there on out, but he still did well enough to finish a ridiculous third in scoring overall, despite only skating out in forty-three regular season match-ups. The only two skaters who put up better numbers than him, uniquely enough, were his draft classmate Joshua Ho-Sang (New York Islanders, 2014) who put up two more points in six additional games, and Carter Verhaeghe, a third round pick from the 2013 NHL Entry Draft by the Toronto Maple Leafs, who skated the entire season. At the end of the year, Perlini and Ho-Sang were miles above the rest of the Ice Dogs in both talent and production — and any concerns about Perlini struggling to get into the swing of things can be quickly alleviated. On a middling Niagara roster, he and Ho-Sang finished the season eighteenth and twentieth overall in the OHL in PPG (Perlini with 1.44PPG, Ho-Sang with 1.35).

Perlini isn’t a big playmaker — finishing fifty-first overall in the OHL regular season in primary assists — although that’s not necessarily what Arizona needs. His play vs. goal contributions were somewhat abysmal in comparison to teammate Ho-Sang’s, although there’s no confusion that the two use one another as a crutch; Ho-Sang was deployed in primarily ‘heavy lifting’ situations for the Ice Dogs throughout the season, while Perlini was an offense creator. Both are a bit insane to watch, though — Ho-Sang hopefully taught Perlini a bit about his nearly indestructible forechecking ability, but even without it Perlini is one of the fastest skaters Arizona will offer next season.

Now he’s in Portland; he was a scratch for the Pirates’ game Thursday night, watching as they dropped a 5-2 decision to the Manchester Monarchs in the opening game of the Calder Cup playoffs, but could make an appearance as soon as the team determines where he’d best fit.

What could he add?

The team has been seeing most of their ‘prospect starpower’ coming from the two Samuelsson brothers — Philip on defense, Henrik as a forward — and now from recent call-up Christian Dvorak, who’s found instant chemistry with Henrik. Adding Perlini to the lineup will immediately speed up the team, particularly if he’s either put on a line with Henrik — a notoriously sluggish skater — or Lucas Lessio, who excels at creating scoring chances but struggles to follow through on them.

A plus that many have mentioned about Perlini is his refusal to pass off the puck when he sees his own scoring chance. The Coyotes nearly sunk their own ship this past season with a collective staunch refusal to take shots on goal, choosing instead to play it safe and juggle the puck back outside the faceoff zone. He’s also a decent offensive zone entry driver, although that’s not his calling card; if he’s on the ice with a fast forward like Domi and a smart, intuitive forward like Samuelsson or Dvorak, they could be unstoppable.

One thing he’ll need to look out for, though, is his tendency to drive play along the outskirts of the rink. He favors driving up the ice from out wide, which also alludes to his hesitancy to force his way through traffic — if the physical play on the ice is left up to smaller players like Domi, Tobias Rieder, and hypothetically a returning Mark Arcobello, the Coyotes could get overpowered with a mismatched group of talent. Of course, Todd Cordell of the Hockey Guys also billed another big 2014 draft prospect as ‘not as physical as he could be’ before he hit the NHL level — and Aaron Ekblad certainly seems to have turned out all right.

For Arizona, a lot of the basics are already there. In a league where teams like the Dallas Stars, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the Edmonton Oilers looked like they were playing at the All Star Game each night, the Coyotes were — by and large — a team that shut things down defensively. They spent a bit too much time on the penalty kill as the season wore on, but that’s to be expected both from a young team and a frustrated team trying to finish out a poor season — and with more delay of game and interference calls than anything, a better jump to the season (with a number of guys who will likely return from the miserable 2014-2015 campaign to keep things in perspective) should alleviate that.

They also had a number of good two-way players in the system. Guys like Tobias Rieder and Brendan Shinnimin stood out immediately as prospects who understood how to draw plays out of the defensive zone and create a scoring chance, the goal scorer just wasn’t there in the lineup — the addition of Perlini, as well as the return of Mikkel Boedker and the debut of Max Domi, should remedy that. They still need a bit more pure offense, and it would be nice if Perlini was as enthusiastic on the forecheck as guys like Lucas Lessio and Samuelsson — but as the team learns to turn the game in their favor, Perlini will find the opportunities to discover his comfort zone on a physical level.

It should be interesting to see how he fares in the AHL playoffs, and then again once development camp begins. For Coyotes fans, though, so much attention has been directed at Max Domi that Perlini has almost faded away — and he may be one of the most useful pieces yet.