5 things: What’s ahead?

As I write this the Flames are currently outside a playoff spot, having been demolished on Tuesday night by the St. Louis Blues — who to be fair demolish a lot of teams these days — while the Winnipeg Jets lit up San Jose 5-2.

That pushed the Flames a point out of the playoffs in the West as far as the wild card is concerned, and into the bad side of a nominal tie with Los Angeles at 81 points. The Kings had, at that point, played one game fewer. (They’re up to 82 after an overtime loss to Anaheim last night.) Now, one or even zero points over 12 games isn’t a lot of ground to make up in general, and even if you’re playing badly like the Flames are, you can fluke your way to a pretty easy situation down the stretch.

Especially if you’ve got the schedule Calgary does, which has to be just about the easiest schedules in terms of both quality of opponent and venue. This says both the Sharks and Canucks had it a little easier the rest of the way after Tuesday’s games, which isn’t really a factor in either case because San Jose appears too far back to catch the rest of the pack, and Vancouver doesn’t seem like a realistic target for Calgary to catch at this point.

So really what we have to look at for these final weeks of the season is who Calgary’s playing, where they’re doing it, and what other teams have to deal with down the stretch as well. That’s probably going to inform plenty about how the last dozen games go for the Flames.

The obvious problem here is that the Flames get outpossessed almost every night. At this point only about a quarter of their games have seen them finish at 50 percent corsi or better, which is an awful number that unsurprisingly rivals those of Toronto and Colorado from the last two years. But the good news is that a lot of these games are against teams which are — while not “as bad” as Calgary in this regard — likewise not the best at keeping the puck. The question is how much better.

In the remaining schedule I have identified five games that seem like they’re going to be extremely tough outs for the Flames. At Minnesota, at Nashville, at St. Louis, hosting LA, and at Winnipeg. These are, not surprisingly, the only games left on the schedule against playoff teams, and four of the five are on the road.

They’ve played these five teams a combined 12 times this season, and gone 7-4-1. However, in those games they were also outattempted a combined 688-527 (43.3 percent to the Flames). This is an abysmal number. It breaks down to 43.6 percent against St. Louis, 47.6 percent against Minnesota, 40.2 percent against Los Angeles, 45.1 percent against Nashville, and 42.9 percent against Winnipeg.

That’s a lot of games you normally end up losing, and without Mark Giordano in the lineup you can’t exactly be thrilled at the prospect of playing any of those teams, especially given that both LA and Winnipeg are effectively four-point games — and are also the last two on the schedule, further creating cause for concern — which the Flames, on paper, have very little chance of winning.

And so it falls to the club to bank points in the other eight games they have left, and by my count it shouldn’t be too difficult to do that.

The other seven games — including this mega-easy four-game home slate coming up — is hosting Philadelphia, Columbus, Colorado, and Dallas all in a row, then visiting Dallas, visiting Edmonton, and hosting Arizona.

Against these teams the Flames are 10-3-0, but of note is that eight of those total wins came against Edmonton and Arizona alone. So maybe you call that four easy and almost guaranteed points. And altogether their possession share in those 13 games was a much-better-but-still-not-good 48.1 percent. The breakdown is as follows: 38.1 percent against Philly, 51.4 percent against Columbus, 52.9 percent against Colorado, 43.1 percent against Dallas, 50.1 percent against Edmonton, and 47.2 percent against Arizona.

Now, if you get creamed like Calgary did in its games against Philly and Dallas — which they actually split — you deserve to lose. But those were also weighing the team’s possession as a whole down pretty considerably. Factor in the losses of personnel suffered by Arizona at the deadline, and maybe you’re starting to think that the numbers can come up against the Coyotes as well.

I still see the Dallas games as being tough ones to win (though their goaltending situation should be encouraging for Calgary’s shooters) and Philadelphia poses a bigger threat than their standings position implies — again, Calgary shouldn’t have won that game; it got destroyed — but other than that, well, I think 10 points can be had of a possible 14 in a realistic scenario.

The key is banking at least five or six in these next four games. If the Flames can’t do that at the very least, the road the rest of the way looks like this:

And man that looks like a pretty tough stretch. Two losses in these next four home games would be disastrous.

Of course, all this means the other guys have to take care of business as well, and really the only teams left in contention for Calgary at this point are, as I mentioned, LA and Winnipeg.

Now, we know they’re pretty good teams, so let’s examine their schedules down the stretch as well to see what a reasonable expectation is.

For LA, we’ve got:

That’s a bear of a schedule. Eight of 12 games on the road, and against almost nothing but playoff teams. It’s hard to envy them this dozen games (especially if you include the Anaheim game from last night). But with that having been said, the Kings are really good and they can at least play with any damn team in the league. More often, they should be able to push even some of the tougher road opponents around. At home, they’ve probably got a pretty easy go of things. I remain very optimistic that they make the playoffs with ease.

Winnipeg doesn’t have it much easier:

Plenty of home games (only five on the road, in fact) but also not very easy. They won Tuesday night but that was a rarity given how they’ve been playing lately. You really just can’t see a lot of wins in this stretch. The question is whether the one-point pad is enough to stave off the Flames, but I’m not so sure.

If I had to bet, I’d say that the Flames are, at this point, really only chasing Winnipeg. Everyone else is irrelevant; I can’t see them catching either Vancouver or Los Angeles. So the Jets have the harder schedule in a lot of ways, even if they do have plenty at home.

Would you be surprised at all if the teams’ last game of the season — head-to-head — is a “win-and-you’re-in” situation? I’m pretty bearish on the Flames’ chances to make it (and neither are the numbers), but if they can get it to a one-off at the very worst, I think they take those odds.