The Calgary Flames lost to the Boston Bruins by an 6-4 score on Thursday night. Here are selected reactions from players and coaches following the game.

Missed it by that much

The Flames played a pretty decent road game all-told, but just couldn’t find a way to generate enough on their power plays. They had 6:38 minutes of power play time (across four advantages), but generated just four shots (including zero on a 42 second two-man advantage).
Head coach Bill Peters pointed to the team’s special teams play as the difference-maker.
“Probably specialty teams,” said Peters. “We had an extended five on three that we didn’t capitalize on. And we had some good looks, or I should say good opportunities on the power play, especially in the middle of the game. Four straight, I believe, and we didn’t take advantage of that and I think it hurt us.”
Playing just his third game since mid-December (and his second in two days), Mike Smith allowed five goals on 26 shots. He credited the team for staying in the game.
“We stuck with it,” said Smith. “We gave ourselves a chance to win at the end there. A couple fluky kinda tips that went in on me, and then a couple ones that you’d like to have back. So I think at the end of the night we were right in the hockey game and I don’t think we played our best, but we were right there at the end.”

Frolik’s agent is still upset

Following the game, Michael Frolik’s agent Allan Walsh tweeted again about his client’s usage.
We dug into tonight’s forward usage a bit. Frolik doesn’t play on either special teams units, so the main thing here is the even strength ice time. He played quite a bit until the third period, where Peters uncharacteristically kept rolling four lines. But the time on ice was skewed mostly towards two lines in the final period.
  • Gaudreau – Monahan – Lindholm played between 5:57 and 6:48
  • Tkachuk – Jankowski – Neal played between 5:13 and 5:30
  • Hathaway – Ryan – Czarnik played between 3:52 and 4:59
  • Bennett – Backlund – Frolik played between 3:14 and 3:57
Everyone in the first two lines had Corsi For percentages floating around (or above) 70%. So did Frolik, but Peters seemingly erred on the side of getting Lindholm and Neal extra reps over Frolik. Much like the Tampa Bay shootout loss, you can probably file this one under “trying to get Neal gong.”
Even with the somewhat wonky usage, it’s a bit perplexing to see Walsh go ham on Twitter in the aftermath of one game where Peters decided to lean on the guys that seemed to be feeling it offensively. But I guess that’s what agents do sometimes.