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Still undefeated in regulation to date, the Calgary Flames have now walked away with four out of a possible six points this season. Most recently, the Flames took on the Vancouver Canucks last night for their season opener which ended in OT for the visiting team.
Despite coming out of the gates with plenty of speed and tempo, the Flames were quick to hand over the first lead of the game with a bad turnover which led to an early Vancouver goal. It would take some time to answer to their turnover, but the Flames new captain Mark Giordano would receive a nice pass from David Jones and bury one top corner to tie the game.
Although it wasn’t a clean win, the Flames first goal was as a result of a faceoff win which allowed them to move the puck from the corner to the front of the net onto Giordano’s tape. While the second period only allowed one goal from either side, it was a very nice individual effort from Mikael Backlund who broke out alone and put his team ahead 2-1. The goal appeared to give energy to the crowd as not only did Backlund come out with a nice triple deke on the play, but afterwards celebrated by facing the crowd and giving a rather humorous stare down to a lone Canucks fan sitting behind the glass.
Speaking of young players having a good start, rookie Sean Monahan scored his second goal of the season to open the third period. The young star playing with Baertschi looked very quick out there on many plays, and while he made occasional mistakes, they were outweighed by his positives. Furthermore, although Monahan came out as a -3 for the night, his play was very strong and that particular stat was no indication of how he did. I’ve got to say - the young players such as Monahan, Baertschi, Backlund, and Brodie were absolutely flying out there.
With a young team comes mistakes, and with mistakes comes goals as the Flames gave up a nice lead for the second time in two games. The Canucks would slowly start to out-chance the home team and score three unanswered goals as a direct result of bad turnovers and miscues by Calgary. As the arena quieted after such a defensive breakdown, it would be Joey MacDonald with a big paddle save late in the game who would allow for his team to battle back and squeeze one past Eddie Lack in the dying moments of the game to send it to OT.
Although the Flames battled hard and came back, they were not ultimately able to hold the Canucks back long enough in the fourth period as Vancouver would take the two points.
As the Flames continue to impress fans across the league with their play, it begs the question – How do they look on paper so far?
I won’t take this blog too deep into stats, but will cover those I find to be most important when trying to assess a team’s play throughout the season. And although a few stats should be of no surprise to any, a few others might be surprising given what the team has done thus far.
With that being said, here are the first set of stats and where the team ranks across the NHL.
GF – 1st
GA – tied 30th
PP% - 22nd
PK% - 28th
SF – 6th
SA – 24th
What the above stats say to me? The Flames have no problem with their offense, but need to focus a lot on their defensive play. They are 1st in goals for and 30th in goals against. These are not good averages as it essentially means that for every goal they score, they are almost letting one in shortly after.
Their shots for and against furthers this – they are getting plenty of shots on the opposing net, but allowing too many on their own. Whether the defensive pairings need to be reassessed or players are simply not blocking enough shots is something that the coaching staff will need to pay close attention to as they will find it very difficult with stats like these to win games.
The other problem with these stats is their specialty teams. 22nd in powerplay and 28th in penalty kill are not stats which produce too many wins and they will certainly need to continue working on their systems…something we all expected with a young and new team, so I’ll give them a wash here.
With respect to individual stats, here is what I dug up in terms of numbers which I found to be relevant to the outcomes of their games played so far.
Face-offs(in order of # taken)
Backlund – 39%
Monahan – 38%
Street – 34%
Stajan – 48%
Colborne – 30%
Collectively ranked in the NHL - 30th
This is simply not good. The Flames will need to work on their face-offs during the season if they want to improve as a team. Winning faceoffs in key moments of the game is very important, and while the team is young and rebuilding, it is the perfect time to work out these kinks. Stajan leading in terms of percentages at 48 is not too bad, but with Backlund and Monahan taking the majority of face-offs they will need to improve upon their individual percentages.
S% Leaders
Hudler
Bouma
Galiardi
Glencross
Jones
Total shot Leaders
Stempniak
Wideman
Giordano
Jones
Monahan
The above stats give you an indication of which players may see an increase in points production given their shot attempts on net. With guys like Stempniak and Wideman leading the Flames in total shots taken, it would only stand to reason that their percentages begin to fall in their favor as a few extra sneak by the tender.
There are plenty more stats available when trying to assess how your team is doing on paper, but for the time being it’s rather evident where the Flames need to improve upon if they intend on continuing with their success. Given their high shots against and weak specialty teams, it’s only logical that their numbers begin to regress as they find themselves chasing more and more leads. Defensively, their stats need to improve in almost all areas available. Balancing them out with a strong offense can only carry them so far.
That’s all for today folks, thanks for reading!
Calgary Flames Blogger • 
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