Recap: The Flames Lost, and Then I Lost It

The Calgary Flames suck right now.

I’m going to spare the effort of going through every goal tonight and just talk about how bad the Flames are right now. Simply put, everything about this team is broken. They can’t score, they can’t defend, and they couldn’t even get more than two of a possible six points against arguably the worst team in hockey.

They’re a joke right now. There’s no way around it. This team plays like they’re waiting for something to go off the rails once it’s a two goal deficit. They’ve only scored one goal in seven of the last nine games. It’s incomprehensible how every is just sitting by and watching the ship go down and not one person (besides maybe Milan Lucic who is doing his best to move this team forward) is even picking up a bucket to help bail the water out. This team is a bunch of glorified cheque collectors. Where are the leaders on this team? Oh yeah, they’re telling Matthew Tkachuk to simmer down. Unbelievable.

Their systems play is atrocious, and my goodness is their top powerplay terrible given the amount of skill on that unit. Whoever is designing that system clearly needs to go back to Atom hockey where you learn that four stationary guys at the blue line is not ideal when you’re sending Johnny Gaudreau alone into four Senators where he has to make a panic pass to one of the non-moving players. Having a team with this much offensive talent playing a defense first strategy (that they’re not designed for) is a joke. Yes they needed an influx of defensive play after the wild system under Bill Peters, but now we’re living with a neuteured offense that was once Top 10 in the league AND THEY CAN’T EVEN STOP GIVING UP GOOD CHANCES AND GOALS AGAINST.

It feels like for the Flames to even be involved in games this year that they need an absolutely flawless game from their goaltenders and when they don’t get it, it’s not even close.

I really don’t have much more to say right now, I’ll probably digest things into an article this week and on our podcast, which by the way you should definitely listen to.

by Michael MacGillivray