The 27-27-8 San Jose Sharks (62 pts) are in Calgary, Alberta today to kick off a two game road trip featuring the 38-16-8 Calgary Flames (84 pts) and 35-23-5 Edmonton Oilers (75 pts).
While you may look at the point differential between the two teams playing tonight and think “Oh, well this is in the bag.…
Don’t be so sure.
The Calgary Flames are currently 0-2 in the season series. Tomas Hertl has four goals over those two games. Calgary Canucks alumni goalie Adin Hill has a 0.9420 save percentage over 69 shots in two games.
Nice.
The good news for the Flames is that Hill won’t be playing tonight. He’s day-to-day with a lower body injury. Hopefully he’s playing again soon, but Flames fans can breathe a sigh of relief that a Calgary kid won’t be stealing another game tonight.
The bad news is that the recently re-signed Tomas Hertl will play and probably contribute on a goal. He has five points in his last five and has a knack for scoring on the Flames.
More good news? The Flames are 8-2-1 when they have two days off between games. That’s a .773 points percentage. Two days off warrants the best results in terms of team success for the Calgary Flames.
Lines will be updated at warmup. Here are yesterday’s practice lines in the meantime courtesy of Pat Steinberg. @Fan960Steinberg
Gaudreau-Lindholm-Toffoli Dube-Backlund-Tkachuk Mangiapane-Jarnkrok-Coleman Lucic-Monahan-Lewis Ritchie
Hanifin-Anderson Kylington-Tanev Zadorov-Gudbranson Stone
Markstrom Vladar
Days off Dug up a compelling statistic while preparing this piece and had to share it. The Flames’ powerplay success has a serious correlation with how much time they get off.
Days between games — Power play percentage
0 – 18% 1 – 22.1% 2 – 23.1% 3 – 33.3% 4 – 40%
Cool stuff. One has to wonder which weighs more on this stat: fatigue or preparation
Game time is 7:00pm mst
@Trevor_Neufeld