FlamesNation Mailbag: Onto the regular season

The Flames have finished 2-5 in the preseason, which is their worst preseason record in a long time (at least since 2009. The NHL doesn’t keep good preseason records, unsuprisingly).

Of course, it’s meaningless. The preseason is mostly a just for fun, hope no one gets hurt type of deal. It’s fair to make shallow judgements like “he looked good” and “he didn’t,” but any major projection is just guesswork. All we can do is look back and hope that there were more “looked good”s than not.

So what’s still left to deal with before the regular season starts?

(Obviously sent prior to Saturday’s game, where Brouwer was dropped to the fourth line late – and before the latest round of Jaromir Jagr rumours cropped up.)

They definitely see it. They saw it last year when they moved Alex Chiasson ahead of Brouwer on the depth chart for the last few games of the season or so. They saw it when they placed Micheal Ferland on the first line and, slowly but surely, on the PP1. They know Brouwer was not the free agency gem they thought he was, and his spot in the lineup reflects that.

So why keep placing him there? A few reasons:

Without creating another three-headed monster right off the bat, this seems to be an option. Gillies wasn’t great in the preseason, rocking a next-to-worse 0.844 SV% (albeit in one game), but he’s still in camp as of this writing. He’ll likely be gone a few hours after this is published, mostly because he’s waiver-exempt, but I feel the team keeps him close by.

The three-headed monster experience probably keeps them away from the panic button for now, but I would place money on him playing a few significant games for the Flames this year.

I’ve written three mailbags so far, and I think I’ve dismissed this concern in all three. Now, it’s certainly real.

I guess you can’t blame the team for being convinced to go this route. He’s a veteran player who was only here to audition but beat out a few young and hopeful names in the process. He was noticeable every night, threw some hits, stirred some shit, and pretty much proved he could still play with an NHL roster. Why not sign a guy like that?

The problem with Tanner Glass is simple: he’s a terrible hockey player, has been for years, and we shouldn’t let his pretty good preseason (context: he is literally fighting for his last top level hockey job ever) fool us into thinking he’s become something different at age 33. Occasionally, the ghost of Kent Wilson haunts our Slack chats to dispense wisdom. Here’s his nugget from Saturday night’s game:

A few years ago, just as expected metrics were getting off the ground, Dom Galamini (famous for HERO charts) developed a metric that measured regression, and how likely it was a player was good year over year. He nicknamed it the Glass to Crosby scale, as Sidney Crosby was just that much better than the average NHLer in equal proportion to how much worse Glass was.

That was 2015, by the way. Glass has only gotten older and less relevant in the NHL. If the Flames are smart, they keep him away from the NHL roster.

Yes, that’s one of the optimal arrangements. The Flames can certainly afford to throw the 3M line and Gaudreau-Monahan-Ferland against other team’s big guys and then throw Versteeg-Bennett-?? in hockey’s equivalent of cleanup duty. The fourth line (as you’ll see in the answer to the next question. Sorry it’s long, just the average the length out between these two questions) is likely going to be the weak point of the forward group, so yes, keep them away for minimal damage.

Here’s the problem: there is no “good” fourth line.

If you’re organizing your lines in descending order by talent (which every team does), just being a fourth line can’t be good; it’s literally the worst line on your team. If your fourth line is one of the better ones on your team, you have bigger problems. Teams typically store AHL callups, grinders, old guys, players on veteran’s minimum, and other mixed bags on the fourth line, and for good reason. None of those players are going to stand much of a chance in an extended look against top sixers. They are likely not “good” just by virtue of being on the fourth line. They can be replaced, and quite cheaply, too.

Even if you compare one fourth line to the rest of the fourth lines in the NHL, you aren’t going to see a line that is significantly worse or better than the one you have. Parity and the salary cap have pretty much forced teams to get high end talent to the league while it’s still cheap, leaving them to fill out the bottom end of the roster with scraps. Even if your fourth line is that much better than any other team’s fourth line, the reality is that your fourth liners probably won’t be much else besides third liners on any other team at best.

Following that, there’s no real reason to invest major value into your fourth line (remember that last year’s fourth line cost over $10M dollars in cap space). That’s where and why you get Brandon Prust and Lance Bouma contracts. The smarter NHL GMs have realized that you should be shuffling talent in and out of your fourth lines regularly, because it is disposable talent relative to what you have in your top six. A fourth line generally sees between 8-12 5v5 minutes per night, depending on what happens with special teams (given the NHL’s increase in penalty calls this preseason, let’s lean towards eight). Basically, for those minutes, you need the fourth line to not be a disaster. You don’t need much else.

But to get to the real meat of this question, and make it Flames relevant, we should point out that even in the low leverage situations fourth lines operate in, the Flames still appear to fall in the bottom half of the league in fourth line quality. I detailed it on a previous mailbag, but you have a mix of said grinders (Garnet Hathaway, likely Tanner Glass, maybe Luke Gazdic), said old guys (Stajan, Brouwer maybe), said AHL call-ups (Shinkaruk, Klimchuk, Poirier, Foo, Hrivik, depending), and miscellaneous (Lazar, Hamilton). If preseason lines hold and Jankowski is thrown into the mix, the fourth line could be a lot of uncertainty and inexperience mixed with just plain bad. It’s not a great situation and the fourth line could certainly raise heart rates whenever they’re on the ice next year.

Chiasson was definitely a strong defensive player and great depth player down the stretch, but he is still a depth player. Realistically, Chiasson isn’t going to do any better than what he did last year. You can move on from him, and for a Flames team that wants to move forward, Chiasson is running in place.

Now, will Curtis Lazar effectively replace him? You can debate that on your own time.

This season? Best case is that he can hack it on the 3RW, or perhaps the 4C depending on how the roster breaks down. It would be nice if he started showing flashes of the potential that excited scouts back in 2013. Long term, he could be a solution in the middle of roster.

Worst case is that none of that happens and he stays put at what he was in Ottawa. The Senators may have prematurely damned him to the fourth line, but if he doesn’t rise above that level away from the capital, this is a deal that could sour before it hits one year. His preseason wasn’t very promising, and if that form continues into the regular season, watch out.

P.A. Parenteau is pretty much a poor man’s Jagr: old and nomadic, yet produces just enough every year to earn another contract somewhere else and do it all over again.

An optimistic look is that he could be this year’s Kris Versteeg. Sign him for veteran’s minimum, cut him if he doesn’t produce. Realistically, I don’t think the Flames bother. They seem set with their roster and Parenteau isn’t going to make or break it.