Since Geoff Ward got behind the bench as interim coach, he’s tinkered with the Calgary Flames lines and pairings. For Saturday night’s game against the Vancouver Canucks – and in the wake of putting the team on blast after Thursday’s loss – he’s reverting back to the team’s most common groupings.
Via Sportsnet 960’s Derek Wills and Postmedia’s Wes Gilbertson, tonight’s deployments:
Johnny Gaudreau – Sean Monahan – Elias Lindholm
Andrew Mangiapane – Mikael Backlund – Matthew Tkachuk
Milan Lucic – Derek Ryan – Dillon Dube
Sam Bennett – Mark Jankowski – Tobias Rieder
TJ Brodie – Travis Hamonic
Noah Hanifin – Rasmus Andersson
Oliver Kylington – Michael Stone
David Rittich starts in net.
Via Dobber’s Frozen Pool tools, the groupings the Flames are using tonight are among their most common overall. Gaudreau, Monahan and Lindholm are their most-used forward trio (11.88% of even strength time). Lucic, Dube and Ryan are the third-most used line, with Mangiapane, Backlund and Tkachuk as the fourth-most. (The second-most used line is Mangiapane, Tkachuk and Lindholm.) Most of Jankowski’s time has been spent alongside Rieder, and Bennett is as good a flank-mate as you can probably expect to get on the fourth line. While it’s weird to see Backlund go from the fourth line to the second line, it does make a good amount of sense.
On defense, if you take away Mark Giordano and insist on playing Brodie and Hamonic on the top pairing, the groupings they have are probably as good as you can expect to have given the circumstances. And they’re using their most-used goaltender as their starter.
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.
The logic from the coach seems to be this: heading into a crucial four game road trip, simplifying things by putting everybody with the players they are most familiar at playing with gives them the best chance to go out and play the way they need to play. They won’t be thinking about what their linemates are going to do, they’ll just be playing. The team’s tendency has been to play less fancy and more direct away from the Saddledome, as they can’t control match-ups or get too clever. Leaning on the most common lines seems to feed into that mindset.
With the clock ticking and the proverbial wolves circling, let’s see if this approach bears any fruit or if it will be back to the drawing board after another frustrating setback.
