Flames Versus Preds Post-Game - Rats in Water

There's a procedure in psychological circles called the forced swim test. In it, a rat is placed inside a water filled cylinder from which it cannot escape. Initially, it will scramble around the tube, frantically seeking an exit. Eventually, however, the impossibility of the situation impresses itself on the rat and it will give up completely, floating dejectedly and motionless in despair in it's watery prison.

The Flames appeared to be trapped in their own water filled cylinder last night. They seemed exhausted both physically and mentally. They looked like the trapped rat, helpless and without an hope of escaping their apparently intractable predicament.

I'm not going to say too much about last night's game. For those who didn't see it, the metrics paint a fairly clear picture. A season low nine scoring chances, 22 shots on net, zero goals. It was as bland and uninspiring as it sounds. Calgary went from scoring rarely on a lot of chances to generating nothing and scoring nothing in the space of a couple of nights. The new line combos was no panacea. The power play was, again, little more than a series of unfortunate events.

David Moss left the game about half way through. At least, he didn't play anymore. No word on if he was simply benched or hurt. Robyn Regehr was victimized again last night on a lackluster play (although one must consider that every lone mistake is amplified with the margin of error so low). Jarome Iginla reverted to the tentative, pereimeter play that marked his last season and half so often.

Like the team itself, I'm not sure what to do at this point. Last night, the Flames featured Craig Conroy, Nigel Dawes and Jamie Lundmark in their top 6 forwards. They have the third cheapest forward corps in the league, ahead of only Phoenix and the New York Islanders and one of their most expensive players isn't worth the dough. Many of us were worried about out-scoring to start the season and those fears were magnified when the team languished near the bottom of the league in terms of shots on net. They rarely draw penalties and almost never do anything on the man advantage when they do.

Both Sutters have some work on their hands. The current Flames squad can probably make the play-offs as is thanks to the defense and Kipper, but if the goal is to finally win a series or two, then more is needed.

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Is it just me, or has anyone noticed the Flames have had trouble scoring lately?

Thanks all for the comments…I’m glad I missed it.

by maimster on Jan 16, 2010 10:59 AM PST reply actions

I’m pretty happy I chose not to suffer through that one last night. Can’t wait to see the Flames here in DC in March. I’m sure that won’t be a blowout of astronomical proportions…

by jpg144 on Jan 16, 2010 11:06 AM PST reply actions

the Preds were pretty good for the first ten minutes of the first. We were pretty good for the first ten minutes of the third. The rest of that game was one giant crapfest. Both teams need to just throw it out and move on.

by Resolute on Jan 16, 2010 12:17 PM PST reply actions

Always close-but they lose

The Flames are rarely blown out by any team-they seem to lose by one goal or in OT or by a shootout. Close is their mantra. Close to having the best goalie, defense, and power-forward in the league. What is apparent is their fragile confidence. This team needs a trade to shake things up, if you pay top salaries to 1/3 of the team then make some cap space by trading one of the lack-lustre over-paid players-get a draft pick, or a prospect-anything but paying top-dollar for mediocre results. If you aren’t a cup contender then start by tweaking the line-up-don’t stand firm and always be close. Maybe Fleury can start working out again, I don’t mind seeing a loss if an honest effort is put forth. At least Fleury had desire and a work ethic. If anything give the fans something to be enthusiastic about. Shake it up! At least the lines-sit an overpaid veteran and bring a farmhand up-we need to be enthusiastic about the Flames again.

by budgie d on Jan 16, 2010 3:10 PM PST reply actions

Yeah, but let’s face the facts here; aside from all the detailed stats on this site that cover many different areas of each game ……

“Sutter Hockey” is “Boring Hockey”.

How many years have the Calgary fans lived by your third sentence? Tough to get enthusiastic after that warm turd last night. And then someone like Chicago comes to town – and it’s a reality check to how far behind the curve the Flames are. You look at Calgary’s payroll and it doesn’t add up for the output the fans see on the ice.

*What a mess in Edmonton; the legendary “Battle Of Alberta” nothing but a distant memory.

by Calgarian in SJ on Jan 16, 2010 5:32 PM PST up reply actions

I don’t care if it’s “boring hockey”-I just want to see positive stats and wins. I would have no problem if we won every game this season 2-1 as long as the stats show we deserved the win.

by Justin Azevedo on Jan 16, 2010 8:34 PM PST up reply actions

Really there isn’t much they can do. They can either wait until March 3rd which is way late in my opinion or D-Sutts can swallow his pride and try make a move. Because once the Olympics end you have 3 Days I believe before the trade deadline and from there it’s just a short jog to April which isn’t enough time for an acquired player to get accustom to the Flames style of play.

If something doesn’t change within the next week we could very well be on the outside looking in and if they continue this lackluster play their might not even be an April.

30 years of the NHL's Best Hockey, It got us through some tough times.

by CofRed on Jan 16, 2010 8:12 PM PST reply actions

If there is a trade to happen (we need a LW for the first line, methinks) it’s going to involve a d-man, and Sarich is the most likely candidate. Dion is not going to be traded till the draft, if at all. As it stands right now, Sarich is either a 4th or 5th d-man here but could be a 2nd or 3rd 15 other places in the league. Even if we were to trade him, it would not be a huge loss. The distance between him and Gio is now non-existant and Pardy and Johnson are pretty close skill wise too, even if the latter does things that make me question his judgement from time to time.

by Justin Azevedo on Jan 16, 2010 8:44 PM PST up reply actions

How quickly we forget.

Calgary played so well in the previous, what, 8 games? 9? Points be damned, they did everything but finish, and finish is something that fluctuates wildly, sometimes even for an entire season. The odds aren’t great for your team to be SOL, but you could bet your house on one team to do it. And if you had a second house you could bet that on another team (not your home team though) to have a run of 11’s for an entire season too.

Of course you’d barely get a toolshed in return, the people who make the odds put their money where their mouth is and they never give respect to the hot teams with nothing rooted in hockey reality to back it up (e.g. the Avs).

I mean if you want to look at chances that’s at least FIVE times as reliable as goal scoring (personally I think more along 7-8 times) and with Corsi it’s more like 12-13 times as reliable, as far as telling you how your team is. And that’s just the math side of it, you step into reality and you quickly realize that the things that drive chances and shots at EV are extremely reflective of the qualities that make one a good hockey player – speed, vision, winning puck battles, passing and accepting passes, playing away from the puck, the list goes on and on. And for chances it even reflects important factors in the all important and coveted finish, that is, ability to get to scoring areas and drive the puck into scoring areas.

I’m not arguing that the Flames played well yesterday, they were outchanced and outplayed. But not by much. And they stunk it up for one game recently (against Minnesota) before ringing off three fantastically domiant games. The quality of a team’s play at EV can have ebb and flow, but anywhere near as much as goals.

Basically we are speculating ways to fix one bad game.

Addendum: Canucks spanked the Pens on the scoreboard tonight, but by eye barely held the edge in scoring chances when the game was on the line. The Pens had AHL goaltending however (literally) and that was the difference really.

by R O on Jan 16, 2010 10:27 PM PST reply actions 1 recs

Yeah and then Pechurski was just called up from Tri-Cities before the game.

I want my Scoring please.

by CofRed on Jan 16, 2010 10:47 PM PST up reply actions

at the risk of being redundant, the five game winning streak was: oilers kings, oilers, leafs, preds. this could easily go a long ways in lulling a team into thinking they’re good when they’re mediocre.

by walkinvisible on Jan 17, 2010 1:04 AM PST up reply actions

There are 2 pretty good playoff teams in there, so if they went 3-2 in that stretch I would be concerned.

by Justin Azevedo on Jan 17, 2010 1:18 AM PST up reply actions

With all respect, it doesn’t matter. We were winning games against bad teams earlier in the season that we didn’t even deserve to be in but for Kipper. Remember that game against New York? I put up a poll and 65% thought we played well. 65%! I dare anyone with GameCenter to go back, watch that game, then watch the game against LA or Nashville (much stronger teams in practically every way) and tell me that the latter team was worse than the former.

And in any case we dominated VAN and PIT too, good teams by most measures. And led by Iginla and supported by the other top6 forwards, in efforts that haven’t been seen individually in over 4 playing months and consecutively in more than a season and a half. I’m not even going to touch on Colorado, they might possibly be the worst team in the conference (losing Smyth hurts, inserting Duchene and O’Reilly into an NHL roster is idiotic).

by R O on Jan 17, 2010 8:58 AM PST up reply actions

I disagree. The team is still broken, despite their ability to play well – for any team to be a real top team there is the requirement of a certain skill level to allow for lapses in effort without completely tanking. The Flames do not have that skill level. The Flames need that skill level. Hard work will get you far, but very few people can maintain a consistent level of hard work, particularly in something like professional sports where hard work is required to merely show up, and actual “hard work” is a level beyond.

by SmellOfVictory on Jan 17, 2010 4:27 AM PST up reply actions

Not to be rude but I scoff at the notion that the Flames don’t have skill level because they haven’t finished their chances over the past ten games. Generating chances is not just a matter of outhustling the opposing player. It is also about anticipating where the play is heading (hockey sense), winning puck battles (strength, knowing how to apply force), passing and accepting passes (hand-eye coordination), it goes on and on really.

Generally I don’t like this whole business of “Flames are a hard-working but unskilled team”, seems like we’re losing sight of what’s important. There are good players and bad players. Where “good” means creating more than you give up (relative to the difficulty of your icetime, your salary, your peers, replacement level, whatever). Ultimately you’re after goals but they’re such rare birds anyway that scoring chances are a better indication of who’s outplaying who. Nearly all of hckey “skill” and hockey “hardwork” goes into that.

by R O on Jan 17, 2010 8:58 AM PST up reply actions

I’m trying to understand the point of what you are saying.

But if a “good player” as you say, cannot “finish” ……. is he still good???

You can out-think, out-hustle, generate chances, and out-skill all you want … but if you get to the doorstep and cannot bury ….. ?

So per your definition … what constitutes a “bad” player?

by Calgarian in SJ on Jan 17, 2010 11:49 AM PST up reply actions

I’m not thinking entirely in terms of finishing for goals (although that obviously has an impact; the Flames are TERRIBLE at hitting the next/not shooting into random players, which is obviously skill-based to at least some extent, not to mention the number of times I’ve seen shots go directly into the breadbasket). By my eye the Flames are not a particularly fast team (better than they used to be thanks to Dawes, JBo, and GlenX, but still…) and their passing is not at the level of a chunk of the better teams. Some of these issues, like Joker’s puck fumbling, Iggy missing the net, etc. are individual slumps of a sort, but some portions of these issues seem simply to be skill level – as a team the Flames have never been the best passers that I’ve seen, nor has the team ever been particularly fast, and some of the players (basically everyone on the bottom two lines as well as Dawes and whoever the winger du jour for Iggy is) just do not score that often.

I am arguing from the perspective of soft observation rather than statistical data, but from what I’ve seen over the past few seasons, there are teams that are dangerous even when they’re off their game (Chicago, SJ, Detroit, for example) and the Flames are not one of those teams.

by SmellOfVictory on Jan 17, 2010 2:12 PM PST up reply actions

My concern, RO, comes from the two to three months of hockey before the recent 10 game stretch where they were out-shooting and out-chancing people. As in, when they weren’t.

They’ve had a nice turn around recently, up until this last stinker. But there’s reams and reams of data before that suggesting this isn’t all that good a hockey team. My concern stems from the possibility that the recent outburst is the aberration, not the other way around.

Matchsticks and Gasoline
Fivehole fanatics

by Kent Wilson on Jan 17, 2010 8:05 AM PST up reply actions

Of course, if the Flames return to form and start out-chancing people again, I’ll gladly eat my words.

Matchsticks and Gasoline
Fivehole fanatics

by Kent Wilson on Jan 17, 2010 8:13 AM PST up reply actions

No doubt Kent, but I don’t remember a single quality stretch of consecutive games like this that Jarome has had since 07/08. Not a single stretch of games (against teams good or bad) like this happened last season. And I can think of only one game (the last VAN game) where Iggy-of-old showed up that entire season.

We are of course talking “small sample” here (regarding the last ten games) but the chance and corsi numbers are a a lot quicker to converge to actual ability than goals and wins, know what I mean? I mean if you were to take a snapshot of 10 games and look at chances/corsi/zone time, that’s probably as reliable as looking at an entire season of goals. Which is why (despite lack of W’s) I’m more excited about the Flames than I have been in a season and a half.

I mean you look at the standings now, Calgary’s third in the NW after VAN’s blow out and Colorado stealing another win (in fairer universes they could have both lost) and in weeks past I’d be stressed out. Not so, VAN’s quality but sooner or later they will stop outscoring so torridly (and their fan base will speculate how best to fire Vigneault/trade Luongo/bench the Sedins) and Calgary with an effective Iginla will steamroll them.

by R O on Jan 17, 2010 9:04 AM PST up reply actions

Richard, I’d like to buy in 100% but check the Ranger numbers for the last several years running. Dominant out-shooting? Check. Eventual translation into goals? Not so much. They spent about 250 games from 06/07 to last season being better by the metrics we all want to embrace, with nothing much to show for it. Is that just terrible luck, or are we missing something here? The Red Wings are still out-shooting by a fair margin, but with no Hossa and not much Franzen, they can’t score at all. Is that just bad luck?

Matchsticks and Gasoline

by Robert Cleave on Jan 17, 2010 9:23 AM PST up reply actions

I love games in which the home team’s announcer giddily says, ’It’s a great night for guys who haven’t scored in forever!’

by jpg144 on Jan 18, 2010 8:25 PM PST reply actions

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