After a pretty poor first outing, the Calgary Flames (0-1-0, 0 points) are hitting the road for a weekend back-to-back set. First up, they’ll visit the Vancouver Canucks (1-1-0, 2 points), a team that endured a pair of track meets against Edmonton to open the season. Can the Flames bounce back? Can the Canucks play a low-scoring game for once? We’ll find out on Saturday night!

Today’s broadcast begins at 8 p.m. MT on Sportsnet West and QR Calgary! Tune in for Warmies before the game and After Burner following the game on the Barn Burner YouTube channel!

Projected lines via QR Calgary’s Derek Wills:

Matvei Gridin – Morgan Frost – Matt Coronato
Sam Honzek – Mikael Backlund – Joel Farabee
Brennan Othmann – Ryan Strome – Yegor Sharangovich
Maxim Tsyplakov – Martin Pospisil – Adam Klapka

Kevin Bahl – Zach Whitecloud
Jake Middleton – Zayne Parekh
Joel Hanley – Simon Nemec

Devin Cooley is slated to start in net for the Flames, backed up by Dustin Wolf. The expected healthy extras for this contest are Yan Kuznetsov, Brayden Pachal and Connor Zary. They’ve shuffled their defensive pairings a bit from Thursday’s opener, with Kuznetsov out, Hanley in, and some new pairings as a result. Zary rotates out in favour of Othmann, who was an absolute menace during his two pre-season games, both against Seattle.

The Flames opened their season with eight good minutes against Seattle, followed by a pretty thorough collapse the rest of the way. Head coach Ryan Huska remarked that “I feel like you saw all of our warts in one night.” Simply put: the Flames will try to have fewer warts on display against Vancouver.

We’ll see how that goes for them.

The Flames head to Seattle on Sunday to conclude their back-to-back set.

Projected lines via Daily Faceoff:

Marco Rossi – Elias Pettersson – Linus Karlsson
Liam Ohgren – Paul Cotter – Brock Boeser
Drew O’Connor – Aatu Raty – Brendan Gallagher
Arshdeep Bains – Marco Rossi – Jonathan Lekkerimaki

Zeev Buium – Filip Hronek
Jamie Oleksiak – Tom Willander
Elias Pettersson – Luke Schenn

Based on reports from an optional morning skate, waiver pickup Leevi Merilainen will start for the Canucks, backed up by Kevin Lankinen. Their projected extras are Guillaume Brisebois, Victor Mancini and perhaps Jake DeBrusk – at least based on Friday’s practice, via DFO Vancouver. We’ll see how things look at warm-up.

The Canucks won a 6-5 overtime track meet on Tuesday night, then lost a 9-7 track meet on Thursday evening. We’re not sure what we can take away from those two games aside from snarking about the 1980s run-and-gun nature of those games. The Flames are not well-suited to run and gun, so they’ll have to do their best to avoid getting into a track meet against Vancouver.

Vancouver hosts Vegas on Sunday to conclude their own back-to-back set.

The Flames are without Jonathan Huberdeau.

The Canucks are without Thatcher Demko and Filip Chytil.

This is the first of four clashes between these rivals this season. They’ll meet again on Dec. 26 (in Calgary), Feb. 27 (in Vancouver) and Apr. 10 (in the final-ever regular season Saddledome game).