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FlamesNation mailbag: All-Star edition part 2 – asking the small questions
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Ryan Pike
Jan 22, 2020, 12:00 ESTUpdated: Jan 22, 2020, 01:24 EST
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It’s the All-Star Break! Our weekly call for mailbag questions resulted in a ton of good questions, so we’ve split the mailbag into two parts this week.
Part one on Monday dealt with some big macro thoughts on where the Flames are going as a franchise. Part two digs into more trade deadliney things.
The short answer is “it depends who you ask.”
Our friend Dom Luszczyszyn at The Athletic does detailed projections. He has the second wildcard team in the West at around 92 points and home ice at 93 points. The margins in Dom’s projections are razor-thin.
Sports Club Stats has 91 points as the cut-off for the playoffs.
Looking at the past few seasons, generally-speaking the final Western playoff team has around 93 points.
For safety, let’s say the Flames need to have 95 points to feel reasonable confident that they’ll be playing past the first weekend in April (or to have a shot at home ice in the first round).
The asking price for Tyler Toffoli is said to be a second round pick and a prospect. To acquire a player with a bit of term left, the price tag probably becomes a first round pick and a prospect.
I’d wager that he is. Remember: nobody knew that Dougie Hamilton was even available when the Flames traded for him. When Noah Hanifin and Elias Lindholm were acquired, the chatter the day before was “Hey, it seems that negotiations with Carolina are going slowly…” and suddenly they were traded. Treliving has a reputation for burning the phone lines in order to get things done. There are probably very few GMs he hasn’t chatted up lately.
If we’re focusing just on Gaudreau’s percentages regressing to his career averages, he’s bound for a bounce-back. He’s shooting 9.2% right now and his career average is 12.4%.
That said, there’s very little variation right now between his actual goals and his expected goals. What that says is he’s not generating the same quality of scoring chances that he did in seasons past. If he’s willing to get into the dirty areas more often, or uses his teammates more effectively, his numbers will rebound. But nowadays he’s too often over-handling the puck or skating into the offensive zone, button-hooking and getting stranded behind a wall of opposing players.
Unless he changes up what he’s doing, it’s unrealistic to expect a whole lot more out of him offensively.
Honestly, it’s (a) very rare for a pending unrestricted free agent defender of consequence to be traded as a trade deadline rental and (b) rare for them to fetch a first round pick.
For some reference:
  • Adam McQuaid landed prospect Julius Bergmann, a 4th rounder and a 7th rounder
  • Ben Lovejoy fetched Connor Carrick and a 3rd rounder
  • Ian Cole was traded for prospect Nick Moutrey and a 3rd rounder
  • Mark Streit was traded twice: once for Valtteri Filppula, a 4th rounder and a conditional 7th rounder, and again at 50% of salary retained for a 4th rounder.
The cap hits for Brodie ($4.65 million) and Hamonic ($3.857 million) would make moving them a bit of a challenge, and the likely price either of them would fetch would likely be a mid-round pick (3rd or 4th rounder) and a secondary prospect of some kind. It might not be worth the hassle.
The Flames analytics department did a deep dive on Backlund prior to the last contract negotiation. The conclusions they reached were why they paid a premium for a guy that doesn’t score a ton: he’s good at so many different things that they would need to bring in several players to replace him.
His personal shooting percentage has tanked a ton this season – his expected goals are 11.78, he has scored – but it’s not like he’s not getting chances. He’s not burying his chances, but unlike Gaudreau the type and quantity of chances he’s getting suggest he’s merely snake-bit and not falling into a chasm.
He’s 30. He’s healthy. He’s not Selke level this season, and he might not ever be again, but he’s a damn fine two-way player whose offensive numbers are bound to bounce back (eventually).
And let’s sneak in a “big question” left over from Monday…
I touched on this on my Monday radio chat with Peter Klein on Sportsnet 960 The Fan, but here’s where my befuddlement comes from: they should be better than this.
We’re 50 games into the season. The Flames have put together maybe one goal-star complete game of good hockey – if you want to stretch your definition to two periods where they out-class their opposition, that bumps up to maybe five good games. The other 45 games have been fairly middling and inconsistent, which is incredible when you recall that (a) the Flames out-classed teams roughly 35 times in 2018-19 and (b) this is the exact same team, aside from upgrading the goaltending and swapping out a sleep-walking James Neal for an engaged Milan Lucic.
There are 32 games left and the Flames are masters of their own playoff destinies. All they need to do is be better than two divisional teams and they’re a playoff lock; if they out-play three of them they’ll somehow have home ice in the first round! But this situation is in spite of how they’ve played this season, not because of it.
I’ve been taught that teams should be held accountable to their demonstrated capabilities. The progression of the Flames since the rebuild began in 2013-14 hasn’t been linear by any stretch, but last season’s superb performances has made it abundantly clear that this year’s club should be better than they’ve shown.

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