Five things: I guess I knew it was coming

Since the last publication in this space here, the Flames have gone 0-fer in five straight games, running their losing streak to six.

In reading the comments here on the site and in other Flames-related destinations around the internet, from people who swore up and down that all the winning the team did early on was 100 percent feasible, I’ve been shocked to see that people are more or less fine with this. Well, maybe “fine with this” is not the right term, because no one likes to lose any games — let alone six straight — but it seems to be a grudging acceptance.

This team has quickly plummeted down the Western Conference standings, going from a sterling 17-8-2 to a far less impressive 17-14-2. And all of a sudden everything that they seemed to be doing right, by virtue of what Flames fans considered to be hard work rather than good luck, they are now doing wrong.

You could say that in a lot of ways, what’s gone wrong in Edmonton for the whole season has also gone wrong for the Flames these last six games. They’re getting subpar goaltending, and they’re not scoring anywhere near enough. This should ring very, very true in Edmonton, and Flames will also recognize this as the team’s actual talent level.

But what’s more interesting to me than kicking through the wreckage in Edmonton and watching the Flames continue to plummet into the still-smoldering crater they’ve left on the league this year, is to examine what’s happening in Toronto right this second.

The Leafs are 10-1-1. They are winning a ton and they’re doing it in a very Flames-y way (or rather, the Flames were winning earlier this year in a very 2013-Leaf-y way): They’ve scored nearly 4.1 goals per game, because they’re shooting 14.2 percent. And they’re also doing it despite the fact that their possession rate is only 42.7 percent.

Which is to say that this success is unsustainable. Now let’s compare and contrast the reactions of coaches and management to those runs of success. One of these quotes is from Randy Carlyle, and the other is from Brian Burke before the Flames descended into this tailspin:

Option 1: 

Option 2:

You of course understand that Option 1 is Carlyle speaking after the Leafs beat the Ducks 6-2 Tuesday night, and Option 2 is Burke speaking ahead of the Leafs’ win over Calgary a little more than a week ago. That’s so interesting to me.

The first reason that’s interesting is because it shows what a 180 Carlyle and the entire Leafs management has done since Brendan Shanahan brought Kyle Dubas and the team’s analytics department aboard this summer. Where before Carlyle would have attributed every win to Hard Work and Sticking To The Systems, and every loss to Not Executing. Every win was also validation of his coaching genius, and every loss the result of a terrible effort from his players.

And now Randy Carlyle is saying he’s not happy to blow out one of the best teams in the league. What a difference a year and a missed playoff make, eh? All the “fancy stats” mumbo jumbo people only don’t like hearing about when their team is on the wrong side of them really does work over the course of a year, and all it takes is a seemingly-baffling collapse to do it. So about that…

Burke’s reaction to the winning the team did to start the year is vintage boilerplate Leafs positive affirmations that everything you do is right all the time.

I think the thing he says about raised expectations is particularly worrisome, because while in and of themselves, higher expectations among the fanbase is to be expected. Fans generally always think a team is going to be better at everything — drafting, developing, playing, etc. — than it is in reality, and that’s evidenced by just how many Flames fans sat mouths agape at the smoke-and-mirrors trickery Calgary spent the first two months of the season pulling off. WOW THEY CAN DO THIS ALL YEAR BECAUSE THEY WORK HARD and so on.

Burke buys into that to some extent: That results reflect anything in particular that can be attributed to hard work, even in the short term. But we’re seeing now just how wrong that line of thinking is.

So obviously the Flames will win some games, probably even a few of them in a row, here in a little while. Unless you are truly, Oilers-level unlucky, you don’t just go around losing six in a row with regularity. But the thing is, and I’ve said this before, there shouldn’t really be any great surprise here if the Flames win four of their next 20 or something like that.

The thing is that these results actually came as the possession has improved. Kari Ramo and Jonas Hiller have stopped just 86.1 percent of the shots they’ve faced in all situations during this six-game skid, and the Flames have only shot 5.1 percent. This is a shocking low in terms of bad luck, but when you rode good luck for so long, maybe you should come to expect that the tables will turn.

The Flames’ corsi-for in this stretch is 52.9 percent at evens, which is better than anyone should have reasonably expected, and people will point to that as signs of growth, or success, or whatever you’d like to call it. They’ll say the results don’t follow.

But when the score is tied, the Flames are actually still below sea level at 48.5 percent. And when they’re leading (which obviously hasn’t been often) they’re only at 41.7 percent. 

And when they’re trailing, that’s where they pick up the steam: 57.5 percent corsi-for. But what that ignores is that even in pressing as they have for to come from behind in these six games, they actually have a rather middling possession share in comparison with other teams that have also trailed in the same period (they’re just 12th in the league in trailing 5v5 CF% since Dec. 6). Likewise, when the game is within a goal in either direction, the Flames are 10th in possession at 52.4 percent, and here again you have to understand that they’ve trailed by one a lot more often than they’ve either been tied or ahead by one during that stretch.

So even when the puck’s going the right way for them, they’re not really going the right way. They aren’t leaning on teams when they’re ahead, and they’re not pressing effectively enough when they’re behind. I’d bank on more losses coming down the pike relatively soon, though not in the volume seen of late.

Those all-too-common frantic third-period comebacks are almost certainly a thing of the past.

I’ve been told that hard work is enough to overcome bad possession numbers. So when the team posts good possession numbers (because they’re losing all the time now!) they are working so not-hard that it makes you wonder whether hard work was ever the reason they were winning at all!