I’ve mentioned it a number of times on Hockey Central this season: the team I’ve been most wrong on to date is probably the Calgary Flames.
I picked them to finish third in the North Division, but I don’t think I’d have been stunned if they finished higher. I liked them a lot. In a division loaded with offence and weak D-corps, they looked like they could play a different way. They had a really solid group of defenders, they had locked up top-end goaltending, and they even seemed to have a physical edge other teams in the group lacked. They stood out as unique and well-rounded.
As a result, I bet on them regularly. As a result of that, I have lost money.
The reason, it turns out, is because they look absolutely inept on offence at times, and as much as Darryl Sutter can do for them at the other end of the rink, I’m not sure there’s anything he can do with what may be their fatal flaw.
It’s long been a conclusion of mine that coaches can greatly affect special teams and defence, but there’s only so much they can do with offence. I’ll get into that more towards the end.
First, I want to bring you to my breaking point, which was watching the Flames play the Ottawa Senators on Monday night. The Flames were in the perfect position to go on a run of sorts. With Sutter behind the bench the Flames started by winning four of five, beating the Canadiens, Oilers and Leafs, three pretty good teams in the division. The had just lost to the Leafs to make it four of six, but a game against the Sens should’ve been the perfect remedy to get back on track and start rolling towards a playoff spot.
Every time the door opened for them to take it to the house against Ottawa and score, my word, it just looked entirely feeble. I’ll preface these clips by saying that every team has bad offensive moments every game, but watching the Calgary game I was stunned by how the team took chances and turned them not just into mediocre shots, but basically into non-shots -- missed nets, bobbled pucks, and the occasional muffin from distance.
I thought it would come for them when Sean Monahan got a turnover for a chance.
I thought it would come when Matthew Tkachuk led a rush up the rink.
I thought it would come when Sam Bennett got a clear break in on a 2-on-1 … then chose a deception-free snapshot from faceoff dot. He actually fans out towards the boards to make the angle worse?
As of today, the Flames are dead-last in goals scored in a division that includes the Ottawa Senators (no offence to Sens fans here, but you get the point). Calgary has 88 goals through 33 games, an average of 2.64 per (that’s 23rd in the league).
Their leading scorer, Elias Lindholm, has 28 points in 33 games, which puts him outside the league’s top-30 scorers, in a division where defending is not at a premium.
They’re a bottom-10 shooting percentage team, which speaks to their lack of finishers.
Their power play percentage is “net” 16.7 per cent, which puts them in the bottom-10 there, too (“net” just negates some of their goals because they’ve given up shorties).
They’re not "bad-bad" on the offensive end of things, like not putrid-bad, but this is a team that already struggled offensively and then added a defensive-minded coach who’s likely going to play low-event hockey the rest of the way. If you’ve got a bunch of one-goal games and a team without game-breakers, what you end up with is a lot of the season left up to random chance, with the percentages currently pointing to “non-playoff team.”
In my experience as a player and video coach, the bench boss controls a handful of meaningful things. They can dictate how many players you’re sending on a forecheck, and where guys stand in the neutral zone as the rush comes at them. They can control the positioning of bodies on the power play and penalty kill. They can dictate how wingers play in the D-zone, how low they sag, how they prioritize layers, or how they want them to fly the zone on breakouts.
Offence is much harder.
Many skills coaches, and more progressive coaches today will tell you offence can be coached. But what’s coached are primarily principles. I know with the Leafs/Marlies, they worked a lot on using the “open corner.” Which means that when players had the puck in a congested area, they’d work on getting it to someone who could put the puck in that open, body-less corner (and knowing that, they’d be first to the puck), which should spread the defence, make them switch checks, and hopefully open things up a bit.
The Leafs and other teams have also prioritized having a very high forward, who often will come out of the zone and be skating downhill at the goal, daring D to come out that high to defend them. When the defence doesn't come out, they use their vision and speed from that position to create.
These are good ideas.
But at the end of the day, offence is about individual player skill, because so much of it is reactionary. You can give a puck to a lot of players in a good spot and get nothing, as evidenced by those clips shown up above.
Openings reveal themselves and disappear in milliseconds and hitting those has to be reactionary. Reading how defences move and then finding soft spots has to be intuitive. It’s much harder “in the trees” than when you’re pulled back like coaches and fans watching the whole “forest” from above. There’s just an element to scoring in the NHL where the coach is at the mercy of the talents on his roster.
I believe the Flames have the offensive talent to score enough to win (at a playoff-making pace in a full season) if they improve on the defensive side of the puck with Sutter behind the bench. Make no mistake, they needed help at that end too. But this isn’t a team trying to hang on and make the playoffs over 82 games -- they need to win a lot and climb the standings. The question of whether there’s enough offence here to not just win but win a lot … that’s one where I’m more skeptical of the answer.
Yet still, I say once more into the breach, dear friends. I still see a team underperforming its roster.
So I’m yet again betting the Flames can score enough, at least for Wednesday night versus Ottawa. How that looks will likely shape how much more I continue to throw at this team, which keeps throwing chances into the garbage.
It’s still possible the offence can take off, but it better leave the ground quick here, as that deficiency has left them little runway with which to work.
