Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

The Flames keep playing the same song: 'one round and out.' Has Sutter changed the tune?

SUNRISE, Fla. -- "It’s like a stuck record."

Brent Sutter likes that term. And if you’re old enough, you’ll go back to before CDs and recall the needle jumping on that scratched record, playing the same few bars of the song over, and over, and over.

If you were fastidious about your collection, you would hustle over to the turntable, carefully raise the arm, nudge the needle a groove or two over, and slowly lower it again. If you were at your buddy’s house, you’d lean over and give the record stand a kick.

Brent’s brother Darryl has a stuck record on his hands in Calgary, and he’s been pretty careful with it so far.

This week he wound up and kicked that record stand good. Five players out. Six in. Mikael Backlund up from the minors.

"We feel it in our room," said captain Jarome Iginla, who played his 1,000th game -- all for the Flames -- in Friday's 2-1 win over the Florida Panthers. "We want to be a better team. Move to the next level."

Talk, however, is cheap.

The Flames play into the first round of the playoffs every year, then the record skips. Fans in Calgary are sick of the first part of the song. They’ve heard it for four straight springs. They want the rest.

Sutter to his credit, has figured out how to build a consistently good team in Calgary. But how to get better, when you never get a Top 10 draft pick? When some teams like Chicago, Colorado, Los Angeles or Phoenix, who spent their time near the bottom of a 30-team league, build right on past you?

"When you go to the playoffs every year; when you’re a good team every year, and you don’t b.s. the fans like some of these 'rebuilding' teams do," GM Darryl Sutter began on Friday morning. Then he changed tracks: "We’re a good team every year, and you need the players who believe in that."

You have to read between the lines to decipher that Sutter wasn’t sure of Dion Phaneuf’s commitment to winning in Calgary. And if that is the case, it runs congruent to what so many people around this team always said, that Dion was all about Dion.

"When you sign these guys to great big contracts, because the market dictates you do that, sometimes that player’s desires, wants and needs change," Sutter said cryptically.

If Phaneuf was indeed a problem, then that excuse exists no longer in Calgary. With seven new faces in this dressing room the Flames now get a do-over on their chemistry. It is the remaining leaders -- Jarome Iginla, Robyn Regehr, Daymond Langkow, the silent Miikka Kiprusoff (as good a goalie as any team will ever need) -- who now have to put this team right.

Iginla looks at past transactions where Sutter has found bit players on other teams who have come into Calgary and thrived -- like Rene Bourque and Curtis Glencross. He and the rest of the roster are willing to trust that, among Matt Stajan, Niklas Hagman, Ales Kotalik and Chris Higgins, there are at least a couple of guys who will be better in Calgary than they were in former lives.

Much of that rests with the enigmatic Kotalik, who like so many Petr Sykoras, Pavol Demitras, Robert Langs and Miroslav Satans, can be such a difference-maker when the mood strikes him. Sutter took on two more years at $3 million with Kotalik -- a major gamble.

But if it works Sutter will look like a genius, because this team simply needs to score more goals. That much is obvious.

"It is," Iginla admits. "We were playing well defensively this year, and getting great goaltending. I think Darryl saw that. They (the trades) are definitely bold."

We asked the GM if he was done dealing. He didn’t say yes or no, but informs us that his payroll is such that he could take on a $6-million player come March 3, then deal with straightening out the cap situation over the summer.

All of this wheeling and dealing, as ballsy as it has been, had better send this team towards a new level. Because Sutter could be the only GM in the game who could make the playoffs for a sixth straight season, and get fired for it.

Because sometimes, when that stuck record keeps skipping, booting the record stand isn’t enough anymore.

Eventually, you’ve got to the record store and buy a new one.