With a 6-2 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday evening, the Calgary Flames limped home 0-1-3 on their late November road trip.
The group managed to take November of 2023 (non-stop comeback hockey) and make it look like Sesame Street compared to this November. Let’s rattle off a few quick stats for the month they just had. In brackets is where they rank in the league.
Make It Make Sense – Flames in November 2024
2.27 goals scored per game (30th)
71.1% penalty kill rate (30th)
45.1% of faceoffs won (29th)
Yet when we look at their record on the month—it’s not bad. 7-5-3 for 17 points. That’s good for 11th place across the league.
In fact, that’s a playoff pace.
The play of both Daniel Vladar (2-3-2, .905) and Dustin Wolf (5-2-1, .925) are solid explanations. As with any defensively prominent team, it’s rather hard to pull stats like zone denials, recovered pucks, or board battles won without dishing out some serious cash, but it’s not unreasonable to say that Calgary’s Zone Defence implemented by Ryan Huska last season has really started to come into form.
Courtesy of Sportlogiq Nov. 26, 2024.
Wild stuff. Stepping away from November-nomics, we have two strange months to look at. What may be the strangest greater trend going on this season is that the Flames have a tendency to go on four-game streaks.
The team has won four games in a row twice. They’ve lost four games in a row twice. Over 25 games, they’ve spent 16 of those on some form of four-game streak.
That may not seem like a lot, but that’s over half of their time this season. 64%, to be exact, either playing like a top-five team or a lottery-bound basement dweller.
Oh, and both losing streaks? Happened at the end of October and November. The Flames are 12-2-3 outside of those end-of-the-month bombing runs.
You're in the wrong place if you want a normal team to cheer for.
Let’s jump to today. It appears we have entered Act II of the 2024-2025 Flames season. See if you can notice any differences in today’s practice lines. Courtesy of Pat Steinberg. @Fan960Steinberg
Huberdeau-Kadri-Pospisil
Sharangovich-Backlund-Coronato
Coleman-Zary-Duehr
Pelletier-Rooney-Lomberg
Kuzmenko
Bahl-Andersson
Weegar-Miromanov
Bean-Pachal
Hanley-Barrie
Vladar
Wolf
Certainly, a few things are going on. Adam Klapka is back out. The recently recalled Walker Duehr and Jakob Pelletier are in—both slotted into lines that appear to be some sort of dog’s breakfast of Flames forwards.
Most notably? Kuzmenko looks like he’ll be eating popcorn during Tuesday’s home game against the Blue Jackets.
Bluesmenko
With one goal and eight assists for nine points in 25 games this season and currently on a nine-game pointless streak, the writing was on the wall. A game off appears to be in the cards for Andrei Kuzmenko, who ran Calgary’s powerplay at a 32% clip for the final 30 days of last season.
Will it work? We at HockeyBuzz have our doubts. Kuzmenko was healthy scratched five times by January 4 last year when playing for Rick Tocchet’s Vancouver Canucks.
The Yakutsk, Russia product left the Canucks organization with eight goals and 13 assists on the season for 21 points in 43 games.
With Calgary? He immediately clicked before falling ill. Upon his return, he began to produce even more. Kuzmenko capped the season with seven goals and six assists for 13 points in nine April games; good for 5th in the NHL during that month.
Kuzmenko is a notably odd cat. Perhaps the answer is as simple as flying him back to Australia and letting him find his way back to the Saddledome. An out-of-the-box player likely requires an out-of-the-box solution.
Andrei's journey to find his game will be a
truly fascinating Act II story arc.
Does Ryan Huska figure out how to get Andrei back on track? Does Craig Conroy adjust his pitch to: “Oh, hey, he did really well after getting traded last year. Maybe he’ll do that for you guys.”
After all, Kuzmenko is an unrestricted free agent on July 1, 2025. His $5,500,000 annual cap hit should be diminished to a reasonable $1,274,900 by the March 7 NHL Trade Deadline.
The clock is running, and Andrei has the tools to get that bag. Get your popcorn.
Stats courtesy of PuckPedia and the National Hockey League.
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