FlamesNation mailbag: we’re back, folks
By Ryan Pike
3 years agoThe Calgary Flames will begin their 2020-21 season on January 13! We’re a scant two weeks away from training camp opening! We’re getting nine or 10 Battles of Alberta in 2021!
Action! Excitement! Mailbag time!
Three keys to regular season success:
- Stay healthy! They don’t have the cap space to do much on-the-fly lineup tinkering if they lose a player or two to significant injuries.
- Find chemistry early! With no pre-season, the teams that find their games quickly will be the most successful. So it’s incumbent on Geoff Ward to find out which combinations of players work well together, then ride the heck out of those combinations to maximize the on-ice results.
- Defensive zone exits! If you’ve watched the Flames in the Gaudreau Era, you’ve noticed that the team can be its own worst enemy at times in their own zone. If the forwards are coming back to help the defenders with quick, clean passes to transition into the neutral zone, then the Flames will be successful. But if the forwards cheat into the neutral zone and the passes get stretched out, chaos will soon follow.
The three Keys to playoff success are a little bit simpler:
- Jacob Markstrom!
- Matthew Tkachuk!
- Mark Giordano!
If the Flames’ stars play like stars in the post-season, they’ll be fine.
Nope!
It’s 16 teams, the top four teams from each of the four divisions. There are two rounds of in-division playoffs (1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3, then the winners against each other), followed by a league semi-final series pitting the surviving team with the best regular season record against the worst one, and the other two against each other – basically 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 of the four playoff division champions.
The Saddledome won’t be closed and demolished until late 2024 or early 2025, but as of last word the plan was to allow some stripping of it for parts and memorabilia. More likely than not, I would expect an auction to be taking place of stuff like seats and keepsakes, likely with the proceeds going to the Flames Foundation.
But considering this won’t be happening for four more years, plans could change in the interim.
I’m a big fan of Natural Stat Trick for analytics, and it may be the most user-friendly stats site out there right now.
Aside from NST, I regularly use Dobber’s Frozen Pool tools (for past lines and lineups), Daily Faceoff (for current lines and lineups), Hockey Reference (for historical look-ups) and Elite Prospects (for stats check-ins for non-NHL leagues).
Here’s one: Juuso Valimaki emerges as a top pairing defender with the Flames, stays healthy all season, and finishes top three in Calder Trophy balloting.
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