GLENDALE – Our team has been on a long break since our last game so we’re all ready for Thursday’s game against Colorado to get here. We had a rough schedule in October with so many back-to-back games and a lot of flying, so it’s been nice to be home in Arizona for a week or so. Obviously, we lost the Vancouver game last Friday, so we want to get back to business and back to our winning ways right away.

I think we came out of the gate well this season. Everybody played fast and strong in the first 11 games. We’ve just got to keep that up and play even better moving forward.

As for me, some people are saying I struggled the first five games or so and that’s true. But I hadn’t played an NHL game in almost 10 months so I was expecting to struggle a little bit at the beginning of the season. That comes with not playing for so long. The first couple of games weren’t easy for me and I had to find my way again. But lately I feel I’ve made some progress and I’m starting to find my confidence again. I’m excited to get back into the games.

We’ve had a lot of days off recently and we’ve been able squeeze in some fun around our practices. On Monday, we all played in the Arizona Coyotes Foundation’s annual golf tournament on a beautiful sunny day. It was really enjoyable. The foundation did an outstanding job once again, and we’re always happy to support them. I played OK. The guys in my group were guys who only play golf a few times a year so I was sort of the go-to-guy and it wasn’t pretty. We made even par in a scramble, which is a little embarrassing, but we had a really good time and it was all about raising money for the foundation so nobody really cared too much about the scores.

Over the weekend, I had a really good time at our team’s Halloween party. I went dressed as Ted the bear from the movie by Seth Macfarlane. It was a pretty good costume but I was really hot inside it and I didn’t realize how many people liked bears so I was giving high fives all night. In my opinion, Mike Smith and his wife had the best costumes at the party. He came dressed as Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s Tinder profile and she came dressed as mine. It was very creative and very clever. There were many other good costumes at the party and we all had a lot of fun. It’s always cool to hear about the different ideas people come up with for Halloween costumes and to see how they make some of them work.

Thanks for reading.