FN Mailbag – April 17, 2017

“The curse” remains intact.

The Flames need to win in Anaheim (at least once) to somehow win this series, but just how to do that continues to elude this franchise.

Aside from the poor discipline and the brain cramps (*cough* bad change *cough*) I thought the Flames played well enough win to either game. That’s at least encouraging given the quality of team they are facing and the fact that they were on the road.

Moral victories are hollow at this time of year though. At some point the Flames are going to have to win at the Honda Center. Getting a few bounces wouldn’t hurt either.

Right to the point. I like that.

As mentioned, I believe Calgary could have won either game but for a handful bounces, breaks, and bad decisions.

In Game 1, the Flames shot themselves in the foot with a couple of bad penalties and a poor line change that would even make minor hockey coaches cringe.

In Game 2, Brian Elliott spotted the Ducks two marginal goals and then the hockey gods handed the game winner over for good measure. Discipline was again an issue, with Dougie Hamilton and T.J. Brodie each taking a penalty in the last five minutes of the game.

The two clubs have been fairly evenly matched aside from those issues so far.

I’ve mostly liked what Glen Gulutzan has done this year behind the bench, but there are a couple of lingering issues with his decision making.

Perhaps the biggest is GG’s propensity for spreading out the ice time across the roster. While rolling four lines can help keep the big guns fresh, it also means allocating more ice time to the bottom of the rotation. Calgary is a fairly top-heavy team, making this even tendency even less sensible.

For example, during the regular season Mark Giordano averaged 17:45 in ES ice time per game. Dougie Hamilton averaged 16:32. And Deryk Engelland came in at 15:04. So the Flames’ near-Norris caliber defender and their top-10 offensive weapon on the backend played only marginally more than the club’s 35-year-old replacement-level rearguard at five-on-five.

There are similar examples up front. For instance, Mikael Backlund averaged only a minute more of even strength ice time than Troy Brouwer. One guy is a potential Selke candidate this year and centers one of the best ES lines in the league. The other guy is the Flames’ worst even strength forward by almost any measure you care to name.

Tyler Dellow raised this issue in a recent article for The Athletic, specifically on the playing time of top six vs bottom six players:

As you can see, the Flames’ top six forwards accounted for less than 55% of ice time during the season.

Darcy McGrath of Calgarypuck also looked at GG’s player usage and ice times near the end of the year. Again, the issue is: Calgary doesn’t player their best enough.

To Glen’s credit, his player usage has been far more tilted towards his stars during the postseason so far, at least on the backend. Matt Bartkowski and Engelland are averaging just 13 and 11 even strength minutes per game, for example. The forwards aren’t quite as spread out at five-on-five, but then there has been a lot of special teams time so far.

Another Gulutzan habit that baffles me is his penchant for starting periods with the Flames’ third and fourth lines. He’s been doing it for weeks now and for the life of me I can’t figure out the tactical benefit of kicking off the game or a new period with the club’s worst even strength players.

The main adjustment is the Flames skaters just need to play smarter hockey. Eliminating dumb penalties and large scale errors like the infamous line change would go a long way to tipping things back in Calgary’s favour.

I think Calgary also needs to find a better way to break the trap when/if Anaheim falls back into clogging the neutral zone. Randy Carlyle has gone to four or five men at the redline in the third period of both games so far and the Flames have often struggled to effectively break through the clog.

Finally, the team needs a couple of its stars to step up. Dougie Hamilton has had trouble staying out of the penalty box and Johnny Gaudreau has yet to truly take over a game (although Calgary’s first line as a whole has been its best so far). The team also needs the 3M line to get back to the five-on-five dominance we saw from them during the regular season.

Yes. Even if this year ends in the terrible frustration of losing to the Ducks (again), the Flames have taken real steps forward in 2016-17. If Brad Treliving can use the summer to fill some gaps (or at least eliminate some of the bad deals), Calgary should be poised to take another step forward next season.

There’s no causal explanation for the Flames’ continued futility in Anaheim. Even if Calgary had been the worst team in the league over the last decade and the Anaheim the best, you’d expect the Flames to win a handful of games at the Honda Center as a matter of course. Both clubs have turned over entire rosters, coaching staffs and front offices during the streak of infamy, so the only constant has been the laundry and locations.

Sometimes weird, improbable things just… happen.

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