Brad Treliving spoke about Johnny Gaudreau, Darryl Sutter and the Flames locker room on Spittin Chiclets
1 year ago
Calgary Flames general manager Brad Treliving was interviewed on the “Spittin Chiclets” podcast on Tuesday. The winner of the 2022 off-season sat down for a lengthy 45-minute interview where he discussed the off-season, the dressing room, working in Arizona with Don Maloney and bringing in Darryl Sutter to coach the team.
There weren’t many new anecdotes about the Flames that we haven’t heard already from the GM. But here are some of the noteworthy quotes from his interview.
The guys were joking around about the Flames locker room after it took some heat from hockey fans on social media. Here is what Treliving had to say about the room.
“Hey, hey, now the locker room has taken a lot of heat here. My daughters tell me about the heat the locker room took on social media. The locker room, and I don’t know, somebody came in and took some pictures of it. At that time, it was the middle of the summer, a lot of the stuff is done. The locker room is just fine. Let’s just pump the breaks on the locker room. When it’s all dressed up, the locker room looks good.”
The idea of trading Johnny Gaudreau last season was brought up to Treliving. Here is what he had to say.
“No. I mean the team was going well and our hope was to have a strong finish to the year and go on a playoff run. You know these things at the end of the day, they’re easy to Monday morning quarterback after the fact and say okay well, you know you didn’t end up re-signing him and you should have moved him. I think it would have been a real difficult thing to see, a thing for us to do with the season we were having. How important Johnny was and the season that he was having. And again, our hope was to get him done in the off-season. It didn’t happen. But no, that wasn’t anything we put any thought into.”
They talked about Treliving’s time with the Phoenix Coyotes and about current Flames senior VP of hockey operations Don Maloney, and what impact he has had on Treliving.
“I say it all the time… the uncertainty was daily. And for what he (Maloney) was able to do, leading that organization and sort of putting it all, not allowing it to affect the group. He (Maloney) was able to put together playoff teams. We were at the bottom of the scale in terms of the payroll every year. He brought Tip (Dave Tippett) in and I thought he did a marvelous job with the group there. You learned a lot. You learned a lot on how you make the most of what you got. You have to make smart decisions. I owe everything to Don, and bringing me in there and learning from him and giving me an opportunity to work in the league. It was a great group. It was a great group of people lead by the coaching staff and Tippett, the training staff and the crew there. And when you go through the things we did, you know it feels like every year the team is moving here the team is moving there, uncertainty all the time. It sort of built that bond… Those were fun days.”
The most interesting part of the interview from a Flames perspective is when they discussed Treliving bringing Darryl Sutter in to coach the Flames.
“Well I had talked to him a few times over the years about coming in. At the time that I hired him, he was consulting and working with Anaheim, consulting with the coaches down there. I had gone to him before and it just wasn’t the right time for him. His farm here is about four hours from Calgary. I think he is an Alberta guy and this is where he should be at. When I went to him a year and a half ago, two years ago now, he was really interested and wanted a couple days to think about it and wanted to talk to his wife, Wanda. He made the decision to come. The amount of hours these guys put in, they’re all in. It’s a demanding job and he (Sutter) wanted to make sure he was wanting to do that again, because he is all in and certainly was. And we’re the benefactors for it because I think he’s done an unbelievable job for us, and rightly so was the coach of the year last year.”
Click here to listen to the entire interview with Treliving.
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