The Calgary Flames, picked to be in the race for Connor McDavid by most, have turned out to be a far tougher out than expected. With Nashville in town Friday night, then a five-game Eastern swing on tap, the Flames early-season exploits have produced two simple questions from people across the National Hockey League:
How is Calgary doing this? And the obvious follow, how long can it last?
More NHL on Sportsnet:
Subscribe: Rogers GameCentre Live
Rogers Hometown Hockey | Broadcast Schedule
Sportsnet Fantasy Hockey Pool
The truth is, at 5-4-2 through their first 11 games, Calgary isn’t exactly tearing through the NHL like, say, the 6-1-2 Predators. A year ago Calgary was 5-5-2 after a dozen games, and would go on to finish five games below .500 and in 27th place overall.
Now, with three of their Opening Day centremen on I.R., perhaps Question No. 2 is about to be answered.
There is something about this team though, you’ve got to admit. One look at the Calgary lineup, and you wonder how a team like Montreal doesn’t beat them by four goals. Instead, the Habs simply survived in a game Calgary likely should have won in regulation on Tuesday, before Montreal finally prevailed in a shootout.
For the past 10 days or so, a group of scouts have been making their way up and down Highway 2 during these current home stands for Calgary and Edmonton. They’ve had an eyeful of a Calgary team that is short on pedigree, but long on effort. We spoke to a few of them to find out exactly how Calgary is so competitive.
“They really pound on teams,” one Eastern Conference scout said. “It’s like they have an entire team of third-line grinders. They just wear you down. And, Hiller is playing really, really well.”
Jonas Hiller, who is looking like a brilliant signing by first-year GM Brad Treliving, has the second-best save percentage (.948) among starting goalies. His career save percentage is .923, but over the past three seasons, that number has averaged .911. That was behind an Anaheim team that, in theory at least, surrenders fewer chances and less quality chances than Calgary.
NHL goalies tend not to maintain a save percentage of .948, but these stats tell us Hiller is particularly vulnerable to a dip in efficiency. He’ll get his second consecutive start Friday, according to head coach Bob Hartley. It’s the first time all year Hartley hasn’t alternated starts between Hiller and Karri Ramo.
That was the other common theme among our scouts — praise for Hartley, which could be a prickly subject in Calgary. If you can name a coach who is doing more with less than Hartley is, I’d like to hear his name. Yet Hartley is working on the final year of his contract — very much like a man who won’t be back next season.
[polldaddy poll=8415070]
We get it. Hartley was hired by former GM Jay Feaster. Not by the current Treliving, or his boss, Brian Burke. But just try to fire Hartley if he continues to get this much juice out of a team where most scouts assess the best forward to be 20-year-old sophomore Sean Monahan.
“How many top-six forwards do they have, beyond Monahan and Jiri Hudler?” asks one scout.
Here are some other key numbers for Calgary that should be monitored over this next 10-game segment:
• Captain Mark Giordano is scoring at a career-high pace (11 games, eight points) and is playing 23:58 per night. His partner T.J. Brodie is playing 24:51 per night. That’s Shea Weber territory, for a 24-year-old who hasn’t played his 200th NHL game yet. Remarkable.
• The injured trio of centremen — Backlund, Colborne and Stajan — have accounted for 69 per cent of Flames faceoffs. Possession stats may be a problem for Calgary, if losing draws becomes the norm over the next couple of weeks.
• According to Hockeyanalysis.com, Calgary ranks 20th in the league in Goals For per 60 minutes at even strength with 2.07, but the Flames are fifth in Goals Against with 1.50. So their Goals For Percentage is high at 58.1 per cent, the seventh-best such number in the NHL. But that stat is reliant on Hiller’s unworldly save percentage. If he can’t stay at .948 things will slide, because with these injuries it’s hard to see Calgary’s offence picking up.
“We’re no different than the 29 other teams,” Hartley said Thursday. “You can’t call a timeout in the NHL season when you have injuries. Boston is going through many right now. Last week we were commenting on how lucky we were. We were touching wood.
“I guess it must have been fake wood.”
