With a little more than a month and a half to go until the season begins – that would be October 12 for those with their calendar in mind — Flames general manager Brad Treliving finds himself with a dwindling list of tasks remaining for the offseason.
Signing the burgeoning Adam Ruzicka remains the only tangible obligation on his plate.
For some reason or another, the six-foot-four, 21 year old Slovak center hasn’t signed a deal yet. Five goals and five assists in 28 games translates to a 29 point pace over 82 games.
The most likely case is that Adam’s representation is still pretty busy.
Craig Oster is the agent for 78 current NHLers. The annual average value of these players amounts to 212,388,608. Conversationally, nine and a half million of that amount is Matthew Tkachuk’s contract.
Recently active NHLers without contracts that Craig Oster represents
Erik Brannstrom
Adam Ruzicka
Brandon Sutter
Fredrik Claesson
Maxim Letunov
Lukas Vejdemo
Jayden Halbgewachs
Tanner Kaspick
Josef Korenar
Most of these guys are tough sells for a one-way contract, so it’s likely Oster has his schedule packed for the time being.
So, we at least have an explanation for the silence on that front. Treliving is likely content to sit on a 750k offer for Ruzicka and Oster is likely sitting on a 900k ask while he works the phones to find his other small fish a job next year.
With that generally clarified, we once again must circle back to the question:
How is Brad Treliving going to spend the remaining 1.3 million in cap space following Ruzicka’s signing?
Today we are going to examine a very commonly discussed option among the Flames faithful. That being 26 year old unrestricted free agent winger Sonny Milano.
First of all, a bit of a description of his style of play.
While Milano does have a knack for scoring highlight goals, most of his goal production comes from in-tight situations to the net. His hand-eye serves him well at collecting rebounds. When he has time with the puck, he’s more of a playmaker. The result is an odd east-west playmaker meets north-south goal scorer.
His tendency to be on the offensive side of the puck during battles often backfires. He’ll gamble on his team winning a puck battle in the defensive zone more often than not. This can lead to some rough point coverage. He throws the odd hit, but takes far more. 27-89 in the hits given to hits taken last season. Milano is best utilized in an offensive role.
Here’s what his production looked like last season.
Sonny Milano Games Played: 66 Goals: 14 Assists: 20 Points: 34
Just a simple YouTube search of the speedy winger brings up countless highlights.
Here’s a look at some beautiful goals scored last year in tandem with his partner in crime: Trevor Zegras.
It wasn’t merely the chemistry with Zegras. Milano has been putting up highlight goals since entering the league with Columbus.
There’s no denying that Sonny Milano has all of the skills required to play a top six role in the NHL. For the sake of brevity, we won’t go through his whole catalogue, but here’s one last highlight of Milano - him finding the back of the net at the Scotiabank Saddledome last season.
So, Why Hasn’t Sonny Signed Somewhere?
Injuries
Sonny went pro eight years ago and has played in 197 NHL games over that time.
This sequence during a Blue Jackets-Senators game on December 14, 2019 led to a head injury that may be still affecting him. He was back on the ice two weeks later, but that speaks more to how the NHL handles returning from brain injuries.
Early in the 20-21 season, Milano took a cross check to the head that had him out for most of the year. Rumours that it may be an orbital bone issue we’re swirling, but nothing was confirmed to the public.
He played only six games that season.
Here is an extremely brief look at that crosscheck. Pateryn was fined $5000 on the play.
Here's the cross-check by Greg Pateryn to the face of Milano last night in Anaheim. Some saying they cannot find the replay at 14:19, it is actually at 5:41 (league calculates elapsed time).
Going further back, Milano has missed time with a core injury. A torn oblique muscle had him sidelined during the 2018-19 season from January 8 to February 26. Although, it should be noted that he had three goals in four games upon returning.
This is all to say that Sonny likely has some ongoing concussion issues. Some teams may consider him a bit of a hot potato of an asset. He passed through waivers at the beginning of last season and his 15 games over the two seasons prior was a major factor in why he wasn’t claimed.
Deployment
Sonny’s career year offensively may have been helped a long a bit by Ducks head coach Dallas Eakins.
A zone start pertains to where the puck is when a player starts their shift.
Milano’s Deployment
Offensive Zone Starts: 252 Neutral Zone Starts: 157 Defensive Zone Starts: 52
Offensive Zone Faceoffs: 410 (128 of them on the powerplay) Neutral Zone Faceoffs: 231 Defensive Zone Faceoffs: 126
Whether there is room on the Flames in terms of cap – he’s not getting gifted deployment like this under Darryl Sutter.
Given that we’ve looked at when he normally goes on the ice, perhaps we have more context on what are decent looking two-way 5v5 numbers at first glance.
GF: 33 GA: 35 CF%: 52.02 High Danger Chances For: 168 High Danger Chances Against: 152
Certainly looks like a positive possession player who holds his own defensively — that is if you discount that he was usually deployed in the offensive zone or when the Ducks already had the puck moving up the ice.
Which leads us to our final factor.
Scoring Context
The Ducks had one of the weirder seasons in the history of the franchise last year. Let’s just put a couple records out there.
Anaheim Ducks 21-22 Regular Season
October 13th to January 31st
23-16-9 – 55pts
Tied for 1st place in the Pacific Division with Vegas.
You get into a bit of a Chicken or the Egg situation regarding whether it was Sonny’s lack of scoring that affected team success or whether team success dictated Sonny’s scoring. Obviously the loss of a supporting cast including Lindholm, Rackell, Manson, and even the presence of Deslauriers affected the offence’s ability to move the puck up the ice, but the answer is likely a bit of both columns.
Nine points in his last 31 games for a pure scoring winger is surely the primary reason GM Pat Verbeek moved on from giving Milano a qualifying offer of one year at 1.8 million. He was given nearly every prime offensive opportunity available as the slump went on while being sheltered from defensive responsibilities as much as possible by Ducks Head Coach Dallas Eakins. 0.29 points per game doesn’t cut it.
A few questions that could only be answered by signing Sonny
Would the Flames be able to give Sonny the talent he needs to succeed offensively?
Darryl Sutter has come a long way in changing the team into one that can defend with all four lines. Does the Flames coach want a player like Sonny Milano in the lineup?
Do more defensively responsible wingers deserve the roster spot over Sonny?
What line would Milano best fit on? He can play either wing without skipping a beat.
What would Milano’s numbers look like if he wasn’t given min/max sheltered minutes to go with the offensive deployment he was provided with last season?
After failing to make major strides in his two-way game with John Torterella in Columbus, would Darryl Sutter be any different in terms of capacitating development?
Considered a high-risk, high reward forward, Milano may not be a perfect fit on the Calgary Flames. Still, after seeing Darryl get career years out of nearly every Flames regular last year — and seeing assistant coach Kirk Muller draw up some wildly creative offensive plays that the team tried out over the course of 82 games — one can’t help but wonder about the possibilities of Milano in a Flames jersey.
Trevor Neufeld
@Trevor_Neufeld
Stats via naturalstattrick.com, eliteprospects.com and nhl.com. Shared tweets courtesy of Hailey Salvian of The Athletic @hailey_salvian and the folks at @nhl_review. Footage included in the gif courtesy of TSN at Bell Media.
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