FN Mailbag – December 21, 2015

The Flames’ seven-game winning streak was an early Christmas gift for Flames Nation this year. Prior to this month, all signs pointed to them being out of the playoff conversation by the New Year, with a race to the bottom and Auston Matthews the only realistic objective remaining. 

That may still turn out to be the case, but for now the club is back to playing meaningful hockey thanks to their December outburst. How long will it continue? Who knows, though if they continue to sleepwalk through first periods and power plays they may find themselves back at the bottom of the Western Conference pretty quickly. 

Goaltending has been better recently – one of the reasons for the turn around – but remains a question mark in many fans’ minds. In this mailbag we talk about Jonathan Bernier and Jimmy Howard as potential solutions to that conundrum. We also touch on summer UFAs, the World Junior Championships, Ryan Johansen and Russell vs Hamilton. 

I’m sanguine about a Jonathan Bernier gamble, assuming the cost to acquire him is nominal. His recent struggles aside, there’s a history of competent (if not above average) netminding there and he’s young enough that it’s at least possible he can regain his mojo.

If not, the risk associated with the gamble is minor. Bernier’s $4M contract ends after next season. If he turns things around, the Flames have found a decent stop gap goalie for peanuts. If not, eat the salary for a year and move on.

In contrast to Bernier, I don’t like the Howard gamble for the Flames. He’d take more to acquire, he’s entering the downslope of his career and his contract is expensive ($5.3M until 2020). As for Mrazek, you won’t be prying him out of Detroit unless the offer sheet is ludicrous.

Hartley rates Russell above Hamilton for a couple of reasons. At the start of the year, it was because he was a known commodity whereas Hamilton came in and struggled. “So did Russell!” you might say. True, but Hartley had all of last season draw from when it comes to trust in Russell. Not so much with Hamilton. First impressions and all that.
Lately it’s because pucks have been going in for the Flames with Russell on the ice. There’s probably some intangibles skewing things in Russell’s favour behind the scenes, too.

At this rate Hartley may never change his preference, short of Hamilton turning into Pronger or Doughty. Sometimes coaches just like who they like.

This will depend a great deal on who the Flames retain amongst their own UFAs and what how much it takes to re-up Gaudreau and Monahan. There’s a chance they won’t have enough cap space to pursue anyone.

Assuming for now that both Hudler and Jones leave, the Flames will have a big need on the right side. There are actually a handful of interesting options, including Andrew Ladd, Loui Eriksson, David Backes, David Perron and the immortal Jaromir Jagr. Oh, and Paul Byron of course. 😉

We can only speculate at a 50,000 foot level right now since we can’t be sure how much cap room the Flames will have or how many of these guys will actually make it to free agency.

I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that appearing in the World Junior Championships is important to development. There’s going to be a correlation between the WJCs and prospect success simply because the best kids tend to get selected to play. Of course, the great challenge in evaluating prospects is to determine causality amongst all the various competing factors.

I don’t know how much value the tournament would have for guys like Monahan and Bennett, at least when it comes to skills development. The NHL is much, much tougher competition, so cutting your teeth against men in the show probably ranks above the WJC.

That said, it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to compete for a medal in an international tournament against your peers. I personally would have sent Monahan to the WJCs during his season for that reason alone, particularly since the Flames weren’t in the running to win anything anyways. Whether that would have actually helped him become a better player? It’s an open question, but I’m skeptical.

As with all potential trades, it depends on the asking price. That said, assuming CBJ doesn’t give him away for a song, I don’t see a fit with the Flames. Columbus will likely ask for one of Gaudreau, Bennett or Monahan up front or Brodie from the back-end. That seems like a lateral move at best up front and Brodie is as close to an untouchable as this team has on the backend.

That said, if Columbus is looking to give him away a la Boston and Dougie Hamilton, then he’s definitely a player the Flames should call about.

That strikes me as ridiculous, but NHL GMs do ridiculous things in the offseason all the time so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Andrew MacDonald was re-inked by Philadelphia for $5M/year after all.

If the esteem for Russell really is that high around the league, Brad Treliving should auction him off to the highest bidder around the deadline, regardless of where the Flames are in the standings.

Unfortunately, I can’t speak intelligently about goalie coaches since I don’t really know what they do. It likely depends on the quality of the coach and the fit between the mentor and player, so it might be something you can only judge on a per case basis. It’s also very difficult to tease apart coaching influence from variance, player skill, team performance, etc. For that reason, I’m sure a lot of hokum and pop psychology can run rampant in the space, but that’s speculation.

In the Flames’ situation, keep in mind that Jordan Sigalet was the guy who was around last year when the Flames’ goalies put up average to above average results (behind a fairly suspect roster). I can’t say if that had anything to do with the goalie coach, but we shouldn’t lean exclusively on the recent suspect results to evaluate him.

Bennett has 11 of his 14 points on the road this year, so it certainly seems like he’s better away from the ‘Dome. This is pretty counter intuitive since you’d think he’d be better at home given more favourable match-ups. That said, sometimes strange patterns happen in data just because. You can discover this if you take a season’s worth of information and parse it arbitrarily; i.e., even and odd games, games on Monday and Thursday vs Friday and Tuesday, etc. If you do that you’ll find some players “excel” in odd games or on certain days of the week.

Chances are these patterns are just randomness. And that’s what I suspect is going on with Bennett.

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