Well, that wasn’t all that good, was it?

On Wednesday evening, the Calgary Flames sent a group of players to Abbotsford, B.C. to face the Vancouver Canucks. The Flames didn’t send their aces. Neither did the Canucks. It was more akin to AHL lineups for both groups, with some NHLers sprinkled in.

The youthful Canucks looked pretty solid. The Flames? Much less so. After a pretty disjointed opening period that left them chasing, the Flames just couldn’t muster much offensively en route to a 3-1 pre-season road loss.

The Flames gave up a pair of goals in the first period.

With Jeremie Poirier in the box of punishment for roughing, Tom Willander’s initial shot hit the post behind Ivan Prosvetov, and then Nils Hoglander jammed in the rebound to give the Canucks a 1-0 lead.

A little later, the Canucks took advantage of some bunched-up Flames in their own zone to score again. That time, the Canucks moved the puck well along the wall, which drew additional Flames over and created some gaps in their coverage. That created space for some passing, as Linus Karlsson fed the puck to a wide-open Victor Mancini, and he walked in and beat Prosvetov to make it 2-0.

The two teams exchanged power play goals in the second period.

With Joel Hanley in the box, Filip Chytil fired a puck past Prosvetov to make it 3-0. A little later on, the Flames got on the board on a power play, as Connor Zary batted in a loose puck off an initial chance.

But that’s all she wrote, as the saying goes, and the Canucks were content to play smart structural hockey once they got their lead and cruised to victory.

The Flames were not all that good in the first period. They were struggling to connect on breakouts, their defensive zone coverage was spotty, and consequently, they couldn’t get much going at all through the neutral or offensive zones. It was a bad period.

From there, it was just a boring stretch of hockey. The young Canucks seemed happy with a two goal lead and they just avoided mistakes that fed into the Flames’ attack. And so in the last 40 minutes we saw occasional offensive flurries from the Flames, but nothing really of consequence at even strength.

Prosvetov was easily the best player in red. Among the skaters in front of him, Dryden Hunt’s line (with Andrew Basha and Clark Bishop) was rock solid and Sam Morton had some nice stretches, but aside from Prosvetov this was a tough game to glean a lot of positives from.

The Flames’ lineup, via Derek Wills:

Vancouver lineup via Jeff Paterson:

Thatcher Demko started in net, backed up by Nikita Tolopilo. Demko played the first two periods and then Tolopilo played the third.

The Flames have a bit of a gap between games, so we’ll likely see some trimming down of the camp roster. They’re back in game action on Saturday night when they visit the Winnipeg Jets.

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