Brad Treliving likes Hawaiian pizza (and other notes from the DFO Rundown)
By Ryan Pike
2 years agoOur friends over at the DFO Rundown, Jason Gregor and Frank Seravalli, had Calgary Flames general manager Brad Treliving on Friday’s edition of their show. The duo chatted with Treliving for roughly half an hour and among the biggest revelations: he’s a fan of Hawaiian pizza.
The whole show (found here and wherever else you get your pods) is worth checking out, but here’s a rundown of the other big takeaways from the Rundown.
Treliving was asked about the team’s lack of big changes this off-season, and was fairly eloquent about the team’s reasoning against a full tear-down:
The more we dug into the analysis, our analysis was we have some really good players. The top end of our lineup we felt are really good offensively players that can produce offense and have really throughout their career. Unless there was a chance to improve upon that, we really looked at how can we best support them, how do we best support them and is there areas of our game that we can improve upon defensively, our penalty kill, through those avenues rather than say we want to replace a lot of our top players. Because it’s nice and easy to say that, but it’s hard to get good players and just change for the sake of change I don’t think is a good manner to operate under.
Mark Giordano’s departure to Seattle via the expansion draft was discussed. Treliving noted the team’s decision-making process behind exposing him – he framed the asking price for Seattle to avoid Giordano was “a non-starter” – and noted that the personnel change has allowed younger players to take on bigger roles, specifically mentioning Rasmus Andersson, Noah Hanifin, Oliver Kylington and Juuso Valimaki.
Speaking of Valimaki, the interview was recorded prior to his assignment to the AHL’s Stockton Heat. But Treliving framed Valimaki’s situation like this: “You can gain a lot being around the team, practising and doing all those other things, but at the end of the day you improve by playing, you improve by getting game reps.”
The contract situations for Andrew Mangiapane, Johnny Gaudreau and Matthew Tkachuk were discussed briefly, with Treliving praising all three players but declining to really get into how negotiations are going. He had a lot of praise for how Gaudreau and Tkachuk have played away from the puck – citing how they’ve barely been scored on five-on-five – and noted that when the top players play that like, it trickles down throughout the lineup.
Finally, Treliving had a lot of nice things to say about Flames head coach Darryl Sutter:
You look at our league and look over the history of his time and the places he’s been, I consider him one of the game’s great coaches. Of all-time, quite frankly. Not just of our era, but of all-time.
Be sure to check out the full interview wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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