Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

Darryl Sutter may be stubborn as a mule, and if he’d have gone ahead for a fifth straight year with the status quo, then you could have accused of being as dumb as one too.

But after four straight years of being run out of the playoffs in the first round -- and the stark realization this season that the Flames might not make the post-season at all -- the Flames GM was forced into an admission this past week. An admission that the four cornerstones on which he has built his hockey club just weren’t right anymore.

It was, frankly, a mistake we would have made ourselves. Who could argue with building a team in the cap era around Miikka Kiprusoff, Jarome Iginla, Robyn Regehr and Dion Phaneuf?

Personally, we always believed Sutter’s Flames were a premier model of how a GM should operate in the cap era.

In the end, however, Sutter could see that those four pillars could only support a walk-up, not a skyscraper. So he has effectively replaced Phaneuf on his blueprint with Jay Bouwmeester, then parlayed Phaneuf into four pretty useful components in Niklas Hagman, Matt Stajan, Ian White and Jamal Mayers.

Listen -- most columnists who wrongly believed in Plan A would make a spiteful point of finding the holes in Sutter’s Plan B. Kind of the way we’ve vowed never to pick San Jose in another playoff series until they actually win one first, because we’ve been burned by the Sharks so many times before.

But Sutter’s work here seems exceptionally sound. And his willingness to admit that Plan A was not working is something we’ll applaud. It was time to stop firing coaches in Calgary and the GM knew it.

If we had heard rumblings that Phaneuf and Regehr simply were not enjoying each other’s company any more on or off the ice, you know Sutter was aware of it long before. And personally, of all the four pillars in Sutter’s plan, Phaneuf was to us the most unstable of the group.

He is a very good young defenceman with still much to learn, but Phaneuf always seemed to us to feel he was there already. Couple that trait with the fact he has great value on the open market, and we know why it was Phaneuf who had to go.

This morning, the Flames still have a fantastic Top 4 on defence with Regehr, Bouwmeester, Mark Giordano and now Ian White. They are the worst face-off team in the NHL, so Sutter adds Stajan, the Maple Leafs’ best draw man (51.6 per cent) and a very useful guy up the middle.

And for Iginla, who desperately needed some talented forwards with whom to work, Sutter procured Stajan and left-winger Hagman, a player Flames fans will come to like immensely. He is like Jere Lehtinen-light -- the multi-faceted kind of player whose name came up last season when I was down in Dallas during the height of the Sean Avery fiasco.

The distraction that Avery had become, a Stars exec told us last year, was obscuring the fact that losing Hagman to Toronto as a free agent was becoming a far bigger loss than anyone in Dallas had anticipated. In the Stars dressing room, players were saying the same thing.

Hagman is a very good player -- very responsible defensively, priced well at $3 million for two more seasons after this. He is now 30, and gives Calgary the perfect mix of offence and defence needed to play the other wing with Iginla.

As for Mayers, he represents fourth-line size and experience. He won’t win or lose anything for the Flames, but as is their wont, a team with Mayers on it is generally harder to play against.

So Sutter has admitted it: his best-laid plans needed alterations.

You have to believe he knew this last summer when he went so hard after Bouwmeester. Today, we saw that when Sutter said, "If I have to move one of my pillars, it’s not going to be Kiprusoff or Iginla. So if it is going to be Phaneuf or Regehr, Bouwmeester leaves me able to part with either one of them."

The Calgary Flames look better today than they have in a long while. And the way Vancouver is playing these days, they needed to be better.

The first guy who knew that was Darryl Sutter.

It was time for Plan B.