Glen Gulutzan back behind the bench and other updates from Sunday

After three full days of on-ice sessions at the Scotiabank Saddledome, a hoarse-voiced Calgary Flames head coach Glen Gulutzan held court with local media to chat about a few things on Sunday afternoon.

Here’s a quick summary of the topics of the day.

With split squad games and a bunch of former head coaches at various levels in Flames camp, the thought was perhaps Gulutzan would be an observer in the first couple days of the preseason. However, the new coach will be leaping right into the fray beginning with Monday’s split-squad games.

“I’ll be in Calgary. Dave Cameron’s going to coach the game in Edmonton. And then the next morning after practice, I’m going to fly to Winnipeg,” said Gulutzan. “I don’t think I’ve put enough games in this league as a head coach, I think I have about a hundred or so, to watch from the stands. I’ll make sure that I’m on the bench as much as I can be.”

The Flames have six goalies in camp and seven games to divvy up in terms of workload. Gulutzan detailed that there’s a plan for the net, and it’s skewed towards the two guys who will be tending the twine for the NHL club this season.

“We mapped some of it out early, and now we’ll map some of it out on performance, and it won’t change much,” said Gulutzan. “[Elliott] is going to get two and a half to three games, and [Johnson] is going to get a couple games; with the young kids, depending on their performance, we might tweak a half game here or there.”

Postmedia’s Kristen Odland tweeted that Brian Elliott is going to be starting in Calgary, while we’ve yet to get official word about the Edmonton matchup, but the thought was that perhaps Chad Johnson and Jon Gillies would get time there.

Throughout the weekend, it was often jokingly stated that nobody gets evaluated during the first few days of camp – particularly this year with all the players learning the details of the new coach’s system. But evaluation is coming very soon.

“We focused on the details, so there hasn’t been much evaluation other than ‘Hey this guy’s fast..,'” said Gulutzan. “We know a lot of the PTO players. The evaluation will come in the games when you’ve added in the details and you see how well they grab them, and how hard they battle and those kind of things.”