The good news is that the Flames were able to get a hand on the extra point attempt and hold the Coyotes to an unconverted touchdown… The bad news is that the aforementioned joke is actually applicable.
In what ended up as arguably the worst night of the Calgary Flames season the events went from bad to worse on route to a 6-0 defeat in a game that they were obviously never in.
Despite the Flames struggles in recent seasons, and the fact that the Flames had been in action the previous evening, this shaped up as a game where the Flames might have been able to get the Phoenix monkey off of their collective backs. After winning on Monday against a very tough Colorado team and gaining some confidence, the Flames were hoping to carry some momentum to the desert. Add to that the Yotes struggles in the past few weeks and maybe the scales were tipping a little in the Flames favor. In fact, the Coyotes hadn’t posted a regulation win since defeating the Islanders on December 12th. Struggles by the newly minted Olympian in recent games caused coach Dave Tippet to decide that he would start Thomas Greiss regardless of how the Canadian Olympic selection went for Smith.
Struggling team, backup goalie, easy pickings, right?
Not so much…
It seems the Flames have managed to become a very powerful tonic for clubs struggling defensively. Checking the ticker, Calgary has now managed to post a big doughnut in four of their last six games and is really appearing to have an offense that is running on fumes at this point.
In their defense, the Flames were able to keep pace in the first period that saw the Coyotes play to their strength: a defensively stifling, momentum killing, pace disrupting style that literally seems to siphon the emotions from the Flames players.
It’s an effect that causes teams (especially young or struggling teams) to get frustrated and try to do too much to overcome the blanket of defense instead of trusting the system and sticking to the plan. That’s what happened in the second and third periods. The Flames had a couple quick goals go against the, in just 1:36 early in the second by returning Yotes captain Shane Doan and Martin Hanzal and the Flames definitely looked ragged and scattered for the remainder of the game. After that it was almost academic as the Coyotes certainly stuck to their system and exploited Calgary mistakes en route to the kind of blowout win you rarely see in today’s NHL.
It was an especially tough loss for the Flames defensively since despite their recent offensive struggles, they haven’t been subject to the defensive breakdowns that occurred last night, not to mention the fact that Reto Berra had his struggles between the pipes.
Looking at it that way, this might just be a throw-away game. There really isn’t any reason to bother overanalyzing this one since there isn’t a whole lot to build on or even much to critique since the Flames got so far away from doing the things that have made them successful that there’s not really much you can learn from a game like this except that a few little mistakes or bounces can quickly snowball on you and turn into an avalanche that you can’t hope to hold back.
Despite the fact that we all knew this season would be a struggle, losses like last night are still pretty tough to swallow.
Have a great day!
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