GDFD No. 6: On the warpath

Welcome to the Game Day Fire Drill, for this, Calgary’s sixth game of the season on Oct. 12, 2009.

Lots of bad news tonight. This doesn’t appear, on the surface, to be an extremely winnable game. Chicago is a good, talented team and, let’s face it, the Flames:

a) haven’t played many of them and

b) haven’t played especially well to get the wins they’ve gotten.

If Chicago is going to make them earn it, then I don’t have the best feeling about it. Second, this the first game of the Flames’ second back-to-back in just a few days, meaning that if the Flames do drop this one tonight, then the likelihood of the losing streak extending to three is, shall we say, high. So the plan, I guess, is to win? That seems like a good one.

Who: The Calgary Flames (4-1-0 for eight points. First in the West, first in the Northwest) and the Chicago Blackhawks (2-1-1 for five points. Sixth in the West, second in the Central).

When: 6 p.m. Mountain time and 8 p.m. Eastern time. All other time zones should enforce safety laws for their milk cartoons. [http://www.businesspundit.com/milk-cartoon-just-got-safer/]

Where: United Center, Chicago, Illinois.

Calgary is 2-0-0 on the road this year, and looks to bounce back from its first loss of the year on Friday. The Blackhawks are 1-0-1 at home and are just a point out of the lead in the Central.

They got that mercenary Marian Hossa — And that would be all well and good, but in doing so they not only pushed out loyal soldier Martin Havlat, who wanted to finish his career in the Windy City, they also (probably) circumvented the salary cap by signing him to an absurdly long deal that will pay him until he’s like 62 or something. I don’t know I wasn’t really paying attention.

Jonathan Toews — Google the term "Toewsface" and you’ll soon find out why. Racism — Native Americans don’t deserve to be associated with these perennial losers. (The same is true of the Cleveland Indians.)

Dustin Byf… Buffl… Bugli… Dustin — If you were to take a Scrabble bag full of letters and ask someone to randomly draw out letters, you have a far greater chance of getting a word that could be pronounced "Bufflin" than this guy’s actual last name. By-fug-lien ≠ Bufflin.

They’re good — They are certainly better than all the teams the Flames have faced to this point in the season.

Why: It might not mean much to you Canadians, but this is the Flames’ only appearance on national TV this year down here in the States. Enjoy the game and talk about this huge W you can feel coming up tonight.