FlamesNation Mailbag: Youngsters and next year

The Flames have a bunch of youth options for next year and a coach that has a history of turning them into offensive weapons. A couple of young guns, if you will. I bet that name has never backfired.

Ian Clark, for those unfamiliar, was the goaltending coach in Columbus and has been by Sergei Bobrovsky’s side for two Vezina trophies. His contract is not being renewed and he is now a goalie coach free agent.

The hype and bluster around goalie coaches is disproportionate to their actual measurable impact. Goalie coaches, like many of the other various assistant coaching positions, have such vague job descriptions and are at the mercy of the tools they have to work with that it makes performance assessment guesswork. Judging current goalie coach Jordan Sigalet on the basis of “goalies were good/goalies were bad” cuts a lot of the nuance away.

The Flames didn’t have great goaltending this year, that much is fact. They had a great half year under Mike Smith unless he was injured and then had to rely on Eddie Lack (two okay seasons, disastrous since) and the AHL duo of Jon Gillies and David Rittich, who had four combined periods of NHL hockey heading into the season. How can you accurately assess Sigalet’s coaching with that many variables? Was anyone expecting him to turn back the clock on Lack? Was anyone expecting him to turn Gillies and Rittich into an immediate 1-2 punch? If you’re honest with yourself, the answers to both are no.

Even if you go through his career in Calgary, he’s had new goalies to work with every year, most of them being either question marks (Brian Elliott, Karri Ramo), old guys who are more than likely to fall off a cliff (Smith, Jonas Hiller), career backups (Chad Johnson, Elliott in some regards), or the young and inexperienced (Joni Ortio, Gillies, Rittich). Let’s not forget that many of those goalies fell in more than one of those categories. It’s not entirely fair to judge Sigalet on the basis of management bringing him a bunch of goalies whose careers hover somewhere between below average to average and expect him to turn them into Vezina winners.

(If you want to go back further during his time in the AHL, Sigalet worked with Danny Taylor, Leland Irving, Henrik Karlsson, Barry Brust, and Olivier Roy. Not exactly promising goaltending talent.)

If we go back to Clark, he’s had a Vezina winner in Bobrovsky. That could be used as evidence that Clark is a goalie whisperer, but also evidence that Columbus has a great scouting team; Bobrovsky was a highly touted KHL keeper before coming to North America. Guys like Joonas Korpisalo and Curtis McEllhinney have had extreme highs and lows under Clark. Steve Mason was destined for the garbage bin under Clark, but has enjoyed a nice bounce back away from him. Perhaps he’s actually bad? Again, we can’t measure that. The data points towards goalies being more responsible for their performances than their coaches.

If the Flames sign Clark, he might push the goalies to greater heights. He also might not do that at all. The volatility at the goaltending position makes it impossible to certainly say which would happen. If there’s one thing for certain, however, it’s that he can’t save Smith from being 36 next year, which is what’s most likely going to impact his performances than Sigalet/Clark’s coaching.

Bill Peters was more or less forced to use kids on defence in Carolina. Noah Hanifin, Jaccob Slavin, and Brett Pesce broke into the league at 18, 21, and 21, respectively. Hanifin was a clear-cut blue chipper, but the other two were supposed to be long term prospects that were brought up to speed under Peters.

This bodes well for Brad Treliving and co., who likely brought in Peters just as they are bringing in a whole new bottom six that is locally developed. The future defensive setup could be Hamilton-Giordano, Valimaki-Andersson, and Kylington-Fox, which could happen as early as one year from now. If you have a coach who has had nothing but success with young defencemen, it certainly makes sense to give him a bunch of young defencemen to work with.

For the meantime, I think Peters will be confident trotting out a bunch of youth in the bottom half of his defence next season. He’s made his name doing so, and it fits his style more so than Michael Stone in the backend.

His track record of using young forward talent is the exact opposite.

It’s uncertain how much of that is in his hands, though. The Hurricanes generally spend their high end picks on defencemen (three of their last six first round picks have been defencemen, and two of those have been top 10 picks) and their lower picks on forwards, so there’s less talent in their forward pipeline. Their better young forwards, like Viktor Rask, Elias Lindholm, and Sebastian Aho are some of the only youth they play that’s worth a damn. Otherwise, you have those middling players like Phil DiGuiseppe and Brock McGinn who are pretty much only involved because Carolina doesn’t want to pay for higher end talent.

And in the end, it might not even be in his hands anyways. The final decision rests with Treliving. If Flames management feels Dube is ready (excluding elite first rounders like Sean Monahan and Matthew Tkachuk, the Flames have not had a kid jump from the CHL to the NHL since Dan Quinn. Not great for Dube), they’ll leave a spot open. But they’ll also keep some PTOs and UFAs handy, just in case. It’s the same logic that gets Tanner Glass in Calgary, but that’s the logic they stick to for some reason.

I still think Dube makes it, for what it’s worth.

I don’t think the thing holding Morgan Klimchuk back is the coach, but the fact that he’s just not that good.

I like Klimchuk, but he appears to be stuck in neutral at the AHL level. He’s a fine top sixer who struggles with consistency in that league, which makes him unattractive for those who decide his chances at being an NHL regular. Is he better than Garnet Hathaway or Curtis Lazar? Probably, but not convincingly so.

He seems to fit the Peters mold of a responsible two-way player, but that has yet to be proven at the NHL level. Maybe he’ll get a shot, but I’m not expecting much. He’s a fourth liner if he pans out.

Like 10%.

The caveat to trading Dougie is that you need to replace him with another Dougie. The Flames do not have another Dougie. Their RHD depth behind him has significant drop-offs, meaning that they only have three pro RHD behind him and one of them has only played 11 NHL games. Another one of them is Stone, so you can see why trading Dougie is an extremely bad idea. If you trade TJ Brodie, you at least have a few options to supplant him. With Dougie, you do not.

I think the Flames would entertain the idea to the extent they entertain most trade ideas, insomuch as they can get a great package in return. If they don’t get an elite NHL forward in the same age group, a higher-end prospect, and a few picks out of the deal, they should hang up immediately. If you’re a Toronto fan reading this, Kasperi Kapanen and Josh Leivo are not enough. Throw in William Nylander and we’ll start talking.

He’s a 3C.

An easy comparison to make is Sean Monahan. Despite being from different draft classes, Monahan was born Oct. 12, 1994 while Jankowski was born Sept. 13, 1994. If Jankowski was born just three days later, he’d be in the same draft class as Monahan. You can easily put the two in the same boat on the basis of age, as they aren’t even a month apart.

With that in mind, let’s look at where they are right now:

At the same age, Monahan is just that much better than Jankowski. One is quite clearly a first line centre, and the other is quite clearly not.

The caveat being that Monahan has had five years of NHL experience, but age is more important than experience. Jankowski may just be a rookie, but the clock does not start ticking when you hit the NHL, the clock starts ticking when you get drafted. From what we know about aging curves (two-part article), skaters typically peak around their age 24-25 years and then start gradually declining. That does not bode well for Jankowski, who is turning 24 in September.

Perhaps there are those who view him as the next Backlund, as the current 2C broke out in his late 20s, but that’s also likely untrue. Here’s Backlund at 23 versus Jankowski at 23:

Backlund didn’t break out, he was an underappreciated asset on a very bad Flames team (his age 23 year was the lockout shortened 2013 year. His most common linemates were Jiri Hudler and Roman Cervenka). He didn’t get better with age, he was always a good player in the wrong situation. When coaches clued into the fact that putting Lance Bouma, Kevin Westgarth, Brian McGrattan, etc, etc with Backlund was not the optimal use of the player, his counting numbers went up. Fancy, that.

The same cannot be said of Jankowski. He and the third line in general were tasked with an offensive role and were a net negative on the Flames’ performances. He’s not underappreciated like 23-year-old Backlund, he’s just not in the same ballpark (skating rink?).

One final point of comparison could be Joe Colborne, a player who also first saw regular NHL action at age 23 and also shares a few descriptors with Jankowski (big first rounder developed through the college system).

Again, Colborne was on a much worse Flames team (worst ever by draft position finish), but still outproduced Jankowski. That does not bode well for someone who is turning 24.

Is it possible he bucks the aging curve? Perhaps, but his performances throughout his career have indicated that he’s not likely to be much more than a 3C. You may be able to expect better things from Jankowski next season, but he probably won’t be much more than just a better version of what he was this season.