Geoff Ward had harsh words after another flat loss

Before he became a hockey coach, Geoff Ward was a teacher. If you’ve been fortunate enough to have good teachers, they’ll do what they can to break down what’s working and what isn’t and to provide guidance.

On Thursday night following the Calgary Flames’ 3-2 loss to the Nashville Predators, Ward dusted off his old lesson planner and unveiled a lecture to the assembled media to explain precisely what was ailing his team these days.

Here’s what Ward had to say. (We’ve added some emphasis here and there.)

You gotta be desperate. It’s about compete right now, and it’s about how hard you want to compete. At the end of the day, when there’s a loose puck are we getting it or are they getting it? Right now we’re not getting it enough. Say what you want, we’ve got to be way, way more desperate.

I think we’ve got to find it. I thought we had it for awhile, but we’ve got to find it again. We tried to be a scoring team last year, saw what happened during playoff time. So it’s like we’ve got to check in now and make sure that we get back to our identity because we’re not there.

At this time of the year, the room’s got take themselves over. We understand, everybody understands how they’ve got to play. We understand what works for us and what doesn’t work for us. We talked about the other day about being self aware. Where are we good, where are we bad, what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses? At the end of the day, you’ve got to go out and play. And so, right now, if we’re having issues with how we need to play, if we don’t understand how we need to play, then we’re in trouble. You look at good teams at this time of year, the veteran players on the teams drive themselves in a lot of cases. And so right now, at the end of the day, we collectively, we have to be better, we have to be more desperate, we have to compete harder, and we have to understand what our identity is and we have to start playing to it.

I’m no different than everybody else. I know we can be better. For sure. We can be better in a lot of areas. But at the end of the day, at this time of year, it comes down to compete. How bad do you want it? I can’t say it any more plainer than that.

Ask them that. With different people it’s going to be different ways. What do you do when you have to write a better story? Turn it into any walk of life. This is our job, so what do we have to do to make it better? With different people it’s different things. We’ve got to play to our strengths, we’ve got to understand what that is. We really need to take a hard look. I thought that parts of the game were okay tonight. At the end of the night, defensively we were okay but again two or three major breakdowns to end up in goals. Offensively, didn’t get enough traffic to the net.

The dirty jobs, we have to pay attention to those jobs. There’s a lot of things in a hockey game that need to be done. But just do things that make a difference. You want to be an uncommon player at this time of the year? Do the things that everybody can do, but a lot of people don’t want to do. Block a shot. Take a hit to make a play. Get to the front of the net. Get greasy in the dirty areas of the game. I think structure-wise, we’re all fine with the structure, but there’s a lot more that goes into building a house than the structure. Once you’ve got the foundation up, you’ve got the joyce up and everything else, you’ve got to fill the house out. So for us, we’ve got to make sure that we’re dong a lot more in those gritty areas that make differences in games. So, I don’t think we have to look past that, really.

Yeah. This isn’t something that just happened tonight. Like I said, we’ve played stretches where we’ve been good, but consistently these are the things at playoff time you have to pay attention to all the time. You guys tell me, look at teams that go on long playoff runs. What stands out about them? You want me to extol the values of that? That’s where it’s at. We’ve got a decision to make as a team. Are we prepared to do it? Because if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to get more of the same. That’s the bottom line.

I thought at points we had it. But when you come out in the third period and you don’t get a shot for the first 10 minutes and you’re in a one goal game. Look at the power play goal: We have a chance to pressure and we don’t, on the third goal, we don’t get in a shooting lane. We’ve got to be better there.

For sure. A road trip could be a good thing. I think right now to just get away with the team and focus on ourselves for a little while, get the guys together, could be just what the doctor ordered. I mean, we’re all in this together. We’ve got to be harder. We have to be harder. The time of year demands it, and we got to make sure that we’re stepping up to the plate and making sure that those things happen. We’re making a lot of goalies look good right now because we’re not getting traffic there. You look at our goals tonight? Traffic. The other one’s a net drive. We talk about playing inside all the time. Want to score in this league? You’ve got to play inside. You’ve got to be prepared to play inside. Tonight, we didn’t play inside enough, again.

12:07 – Minutes into the third period it took for the Flames to register their first shot on goal. Nashville had the first 11 pucks on net.

67 – Seconds that the Flames held a lead against Nashville.

52 – Goals the Flames have given up at even strength in tie games. Only Ottawa (56) have given up more. Calgary’s goal differential in that situation is -13.

883:17 – Minutes that the Flames have held a lead this season, fourth-least in the NHL (only Detroit, Ottawa and Los Angeles have led less).

1357:02 – Minutes that the Flames have trailed this season, third-most in the NHL (only Detroit and Los Angeles have trailed more).