Brad Treliving will try to upgrade his middleweight team at the deadline
By Ryan Pike
4 years agoThe Calgary Flames began their rebuild in 2013 when they traded Jarome Iginla to the Pittsburgh Penguins. Despite not getting a whole heck of a lot for Jarome Iginla, Jay Bouwmeester and Miikka Kiprusoff, the Flames managed to build up their team and work their way up in a competitive Pacific Division.
A lot of the progress has to be credited to general manager (since 2014), Brad Treliving. But based on this season, this incarnation of the Flames seems to have plateaued. The big challenge right now for Treliving is figuring out how to break through this plateau and elevate the group from being middleweights and into true contenders.
When we say “middleweights,” here’s what we mean.
The Flames are a middle of the pack team in the NHL right now. On the balance of their play – their underlyings, their special teams, the component parts of their performance – they’re a middle of the road club.
Dating back to the 2019 All-Star Break, they’ve won 49 out of 94 games. That puts them 15th in wins and 15th in points percentage, one spot above the exact middle of the NHL pack. If you look at their season so far – by game or even by seven game segment – it’s been very win-one, lose-one (or good segment, bad segment). The Flames have built up and have a core full of young players – 11 players on the roster were drafted by the club, another three were signed as undrafted free agents – and you would expect them to be better than they are, unless for some reason the development of the players themselves has plateaued.
The challenge for the Flames right now is this: how do you upgrade the roster further without doing what Treliving has often decried, deficit spending – “robbing Peter to pay Paul?”
- The Flames have a moderate amount of cap space – $2.33 million – but with the cap not expected to go up a ton, can they afford to add much in the way of hits for 2020-21?
- Their prospect base isn’t awful, but there are no sure-fire players there. Their most promising players – Dustin Wolf, Emilio Pettersen, Dmitry Zavgorodniy, Glenn Gawdin, Matthew Phillips and Jakob Pelletier – are all arguably “B”-level players with some concerns about how their play will translate to higher levels due to their size. Beyond these six players, there isn’t a ton to get excited about.
- Picks-wise, the Flames have all of their own picks for the next few seasons but they’re constrained by the fact that their farm system isn’t exactly chock full of strong depth. They’ve been reliant on free agency and AHL-contracted players to back-fill Stockton this season. It’s largely worked – they’re in first place – but it doesn’t have the developmental impact you would hope it would.
The biggest irony here is that the deficit spending that Treliving has warned against is precisely why the Flames are in this situation. Both Jay Feaster and Darryl Sutter, Treliving’s predecessors in the job, traded out second and third round picks like candy during their time on the job. Between that and the club’s horrendous drafting record until around 2015 (with the exception of 2011), you can understand why the Flames have such a lean farm system.
But let’s also be honest here: the Flames ownership just signed a $275 million cheque to build a new arena and probably want some sweet, sweet playoff revenue. And like ownership, Flames fans have been tremendously patient during a 31-year span that has seen the Flames win precisely four playoff rounds. We all understand how the Flames have gotten into this situation and acknowledge that progress has been made to pull the Flames up from the league basement in such a relatively short amount of time.
But patience is finite and it’s up to Treliving to get creative and take advantage of the assets he’s inherited and accumulated during his time as GM. The Flames are middleweights. Let’s see if they can find a way to upgrade.
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