Flames depth shines, but top guns are quiet so far

The Stanley Cup playoffs are the pinnacle of the National Hockey League calendar. Through the first five dates of the 2020 post-season, the Calgary Flames have won four times and played some of their best hockey in years.

But while the Flames’ depth has shone through, they’ve won games despite their best offensive players being largely absent from the scoresheet at even strength.

At five on five, the Flames have out-scored their opponents 6-5. Every line has chipped in, but one line has arguably not gotten the offensive chances that would’ve been expected of them given their experience, stature and cap hits.

The Monahan line and the 3M line are seeing most of the other team’s top players and are starting most of their shifts in the defensive zone. Backlund’s line has translated their opportunities into moving up the ice and creating high event hockey – they have the highest expected goals for and against of any of the trios.

But the Monahan line, factoring in the differences in ice time, has played the lowest event hockey and spent much of their time mired in the defensive zone. Expected to generate offense, they’ve instead negated the opposition instead of out-scoring them. (And those possession numbers are perhaps a bit worrisome, even factoring in the quality of competition.)

A lot of the heavy lifting by the Monahan line has allowed interim coach Geoff Ward to give favourable deployments to the Lucic line – and they’ve made the most of that opportunity.

A similar pattern has emerged with the Flames defenders.

The good? The second and third pairings are performing well with hefty amounts of offensive zone starts. Hanifin and Andersson in particular have been excellent.

The bad? Well, Giordano and Brodie are very much resembling the Monahan line in terms of their (scary) underlyings. And unlike the forward trio, the top defensive pair has been out-scored at five-on-five.

If the Flames are going to become a scary-good team in the playoffs, they’ll need their big guns to start generating more at five-on five. While they’ve been superb on special teams, the lack of even strength production could make the club overly reliant on power play scoring as the post-season wears on.

Asked about the defensive zone deployments for the Monahan line on Tuesday afternoon, Ward explained his rationale.

“Guys need to feel comfortable playing in all zones,” said Ward. “One of the best pieces of coaching advice I ever got was you play where you practice. So, these guys have been doing a really good job in terms of working on the defensive side of their game. We have confidence in them in the defensive zone, but we want all our players feeling comfortable in all three zones. And if they only get the opportunity to go out and play in one zone that’s where they’re going to be comfortable playing, and maybe not so comfortable playing in the other ones. So being early in a series we wanted to make sure we immersed our guys in all of the opportunities to really get a feel for what this series is going to be about, and I thought that they responded well to it.”