Calgary Flames star Johnny Gaudreau may be in a funk, but Brian Burke is convinced the 23-year-old is figuring things out.
Burke, the Flames president of hockey operations, joined Sportsnet’s Tim & Sid from Nashville on Tuesday to talk about Gaudreau’s struggles this season, the team’s trade-deadline strategy, and the virtues of the loser point.
In Burke’s view, Gaudreau missing training camp got him off to a slow start, and he’s had trouble getting caught up. The New Jersey native has had a rough season: he has just two goals in his last 22 games, and he made headlines recently when he was demoted to the fourth line in a loss to the Arizona Coyotes.
“I think it’s a combination of he’s trying to justify a big contract, even though we’ve told him we just want him to do what he did last year,” Burke said.
“He’s actually played a couple good games in a row,” he added. “He’s dangerous every night and draws people to him, even on nights where he doesn’t put points up. We love the kid and he’ll snap out of it. He already is, but he’ll continue to improve here.”
If the Flames are going to make a real push for the playoffs, they’ll need Gaudreau in fine form. The team is currently holding down a wild-card spot, with their playoff odds, per Sports Club Stats, sitting at 44.3 per cent.
But as the March 1 trade deadline nears, don’t expect the Flames to be scrambling for deals at the last minute.
“I’ve always tried to get out in front of the trade deadline,” Burke said, noting that he hasn’t imposed his philosophy on Calgary GM Brad Treliving, but believes they’re on the same page.
Burke likened the last-minute deals arranged at the trade deadline to being in the aisle for a “Blue Light Special” at Kmart—that is, chaos can win out as teams panic at the last moment, thinking they need to make a deal before it’s too late.
“You might pay a slightly higher price,” he said of making deals in advance of the looming deadline, before adding that in all likelihood the price a team pays for these earlier deals is a “fairer” one.
The Flames most recently acquired defenceman Michael Stone from the Coyotes over the weekend, a deal that Burke said Treliving took a good deal of time to put together. Burke described Stone as a “big-bodied defenceman with some skill” who’ll bolster the team’s defensive core.
If Calgary makes the playoffs, Burke thinks it could be thanks to scraping some points together. The Flames’ last game, in Vancouver on Saturday, saw them pick up a loser point with an overtime loss, something that could end up making all the difference with teams bunched together in the standings.
“There is some merit to not awarding an extra point. There really is,” Burke said. “But I think the overtime and the shootout has been a productive rule change for our teams. It keeps more teams in the race. It makes the games, each individual game, more exciting. Nobody leaves during the shootout. So you may hate it as a purist, I may hate it as a purist, but in terms of resolving and having a result every night, and having an entertaining result to climax to the game, I don’t think you can argue with the entertainment value of the shootout, or of overtime.”
As far as Burke is concerned, he’s got a good enough group to compete. The challenge is just in getting it done—especially with relatively few games remaining.
“All the clichés come in,” he said. “You leave it all on the ice. It really is truly a 60-minute game now, every night, maybe 65 … the team that stays focused and gets the job done is gonna be the one that plays in the playoffs.”
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