FlamesNation Mailbag: How can the Flames improve?

Since the last outing, it’s been quiet on the Flames front. The bye week will do that to you.

But there have been two losses and not a whole lot of improvement. The team arguably played their best start-to-finish game Saturday night against the Wild, but the result was bad and now the team is at .500. It’s still eight games in, and it’s not the usual slow start the team has, but it’s not the dominant start many expected from the get-go.

With just a smidge under 10% of the season complete, the Flames don’t appear to really be any closer. What’s the fix? Is there one?

Glen Gultuzan’s player usage is annoying because it’s wildly inconsistent and the logic just does not seem to be there. At least with Bob Hartley, you could say that he’s playing this player because he blocks shots. He had bad reasons, but at least reasons you could make sense of, even if you disagreed with it.

You can see this inconsistency in his wild ideas of putting Tanner Glass on the PK and Troy Brouwer on the PP. Glass is a defensive hazard that doesn’t reduce shots, but because he isn’t allowing goals, he gets a minor role when literally anyone can do a better job (even Alain Vigneault, who loves Tanner Glass, did not use Tanner Glass on the PK).

Brouwer isn’t scoring on the PP, but no one else is, so what else are you going to do. He gets a massive leash because…?? Meanwhile, Micheal Ferland is more likely to be a healthy scratch than Brouwer is, despite there being more evidence that Ferland can play in a top six role and on the PP in this point in his career.

Those are the more major examples that come to mind, but you can look for things that annoy you and find similar reasoning. Matt Bartkowski gets hemmed in the zone a lot, but he hasn’t been on the ice for that many 5v5 goals (only four) so he got to stick around for a while.

However, I really do have faith that he figures it out. Gulutzan can be stubborn, but he occasionally will back down from some of his more steadfast ideas if things clearly aren’t going to plan. He was more willing to play Alex Chiasson higher in the rotation than Brouwer last year, so anything can happen. At least I hope so.

There’s two ways to approach this:

Mike Smith has come better than advertised. He has a 0.927 SV% with a shutout, and has faced some shot barrages on some nights. For the price paid, it’s hard to find fault with Smith in the early goings.

The wet blanket aspect is that we can likely expect him not to continue this level of success. Smith hasn’t played at this level since 2011-12, and at 35, he’s not likely to continue at that level. There’s also the inconsistent label, which has been stuck on Smith since he’s been in Arizona:

In terms of GSAA, he’ll have high highs and low lows. And I’m quite sorry to say that the highest of highs have usually occurred early in the season with his play typically dropping quickly during the meat of the season. Generally, you can get 15-20 great games out of him, but then he’ll have an equal amount of not great ones. Good times almost never last forever, and we should expect Smith’s to end, and end painfully.

Perhaps the team in front of him can provide better run support for Smith than they are now, and provide better than Smith’s team in Arizona could, which helps over a larger sample size. But we’re not always going to get .927 goaltending from Smith, so the rest of the team is going to have to fulfill their end of the bargain.

I’m not sure the Flames are able to trade anything for anyone.

The Flames only have $2.91M in cap room, and most of that is tied up in assets that they don’t want to trade away. The ones you want to trade away (Brouwer, Matt Stajan, Michael Stone, etc.) are not going to be easily traded, unless you have picks.

Well, about that: the Flames have none of those either. Their highest pick in next year’s draft in a third rounder, and their 2019 second is conditionally property of the Islanders (I’m going to guess they don’t want to go two years without first round picks, especially if things go very awry). Any team that is selling probably wants a something in this year’s draft, not next year’s.

Also, no, not time to start considering trades. Maybe if things don’t improve by December, but after eight games, it’s a pretty big overreaction. I expect some fireworks around deadline, but I can’t see anything coming up in the next few weeks.

The only honest answer is “we don’t know.” Jankowski’s only played 10 minutes of regular season NHL hockey, so wondering if he’s better than NHL players is just a guess. With his skill set and his AHL performances, you can reasonably figure that he offers you a bit more than what’s on the bottom end of the Flames’ roster.

But in a fourth line role, is it going to make a massive difference? There are few players in the AHL who will step up and immediately move the needle, much less ones that will have to play with Brouwer/Glass/Lazar/F. Ham/Stajan/Whathaveyou in 10 minutes or less per night. Even if you want to get imaginative and give him Bennett and Kris Versteeg, you have to hope they immediately succeed or it’s back to the drawing board.

Basically, the Flames’ problems run deeper than one player (and it’s probably a bad idea to expect one to fix your team). Any team can tell you, unless you have a Connor McDavid or a Sidney Crosby (the Flames don’t, and those two still can’t fix every problem with the Oilers and Penguins), that major problems with the team are likely not limited to just one particular player and it’s probably a few problems compounding. Hockey is a team sport.

If you want to fix the (needlessly self-inflicted) problems in the bottom six, you’re going to have to move a lot of players that aren’t going to be easy to move. That’s the reality of it, and it’s going to take more than Jankowski to make that line better. He’s a step in the right direction, but not going to be enough to get the job done.