ScorchStack Issue #126 - That’s two Real Ones for the price of one issue you lucky ducks
Ears emoji if you know what I mean
So since Jordan Oesterle is the big sexy acquisition from this summer, you may be asking yourself: What am I going to call this guy? Truly nothing could top Kevin “The Roons” Rooney from last year, but let’s give it a shot.
The top result if you search Jordan Oesterle on YouTube is him losing a fight to Nathan Walker, the Australian who plays ice hockey. Not great! A few more results down, you get “Reaves Blows Up Oesterle, Holden Interferes With Garland” from Sportsnet which shows again Oesterle getting crunched but also it was so insignificant that they bundled it with a two-minute minor. For the top highlights!
After that, there’s a player profile from his time with the Oklahoma City Barons that is one minute long and all he says in it is: “Jordan Oesterle from Dearborn Heights Michigan. I play defence and a random fact is… I won the State Championship with Michigan in 2009.” Talk about a profile!
Anyway, the theme I’m getting here is that Jordan Oesterle gets hit a lot, and knows exactly how to say a lot with a little and when we combine this with his name there’s only one clear choice for what to call him.
Can’t wait to cheer for Osteoporosis next season.
What’s inside?
We had a tie for 14th place in our Forever A Real One Series, so that gets resolved with the other #14.
Tibs does a little something special for the truest Forever A Flame, one who did not crack the ranking in our list but deserves something special given recent news.
Since last issue
We kicked off the Forever A Real One series in Issue #125 and we also said goodbye to the best bits that have departed. Read it again in tribute to those bits.
The prospects are doing their little camp and if you came here expecting us to cover it, what newsletter have you been reading for the last three years?
The Flames got….let’s see here….Dryden Hunt(?) to ride in the Stampede parade? And the coach yeah sure but what’s a Dryden Hunt?
The ScorchStack Forever A Real One Series: Jiří Hudler (T-14th)
Before we had the Purple Gatorade and everything else, there was Hudreaunahan
by Nathan (@hanoten)
Building a team through free agency is a fool’s errand, as most of the players available want too much money and are on the wrong side of old. I cannot think of a recent Stanley Cup Champion who credits their aggressive spending in free agency as the reason they won it all. They also usually aren’t endeared to fans, as they never live up to their hype.
It’s reflected on our list as well. Spoiler alert: Only four of the Forever A Real Ones were signed as free agents after playing for other NHL teams, and if we’re being honest, only two should really count as ‘free agency signings’.
However, you know which free agency signing paid off in spades the entire time of their contract? The absolute legend that is Jiří Hudler, in all of his no shoes, cocaine piss, Hudreaunahan glory.
Hudler was drafted for the Red Wings and played a lot of games with them, even winning the Stanley Cup in his second season with them. By the time he was 28, he was the kind of valuable veteran who still had good play left in him that he was an enticing option in free agency. That was enough for Jay Feaster who used his one and only good free agent signing on Hudler.
As an aside - I’m dead serious about that part. If you don’t count player re-signing or entry-level contracts, Hudler is honestly Feaster’s best free agent signing period. Anyway, back to Jiří.
Signed to the extremely reasonable 4x4 deal years before that would be dubbed the ‘Kris Russell’, Hudler’s time with the Flames was delayed cause of the 2012 lockout, and then overshadowed as being the next best RW option after Jarome Iginla, who was then traded and it was the Hudler show. He was pretty okay for a team that needed some stability the next year, after losing franchise stalwarts and after the entire Saddledome flooded in the offseason. Hudler wasn’t a superstar, but he did have points in his first nine games, and that was fun in a way that the Calgary Flames experience wasn’t.
He led the team with 54 points (those years were brutal) and spent most of his time between Mikael Backlund and Sean Monahan, the latter of which really needed something to pop off to get real good. That something was a tiny package that would burst onto the scene next season.
Despite taking some time for Bob Hartley to see the brilliance he had waiting for him, about halfway through the miracle season of 2014-15, he assembled the unstoppable combo of Monahan, Hudler, and rookie Johnny Gaudreau for the defiantly good Hudreaunahan line. Hudler himself had the best season of his career, being instrumental in so many of those third period comebacks.
But it was so much more than his presence on the ice, he brought joy to an otherwise desolate franchise as far as morale went. There were the little things, like interrupting interviews to deliver pizza…
To truly embracing his role as the adoptive father of two young friends and showing it in his Hudler ways.
This wasn’t out of the ordinary for Hudler, who the past season made headlines for crashing a Lakers practice still dressed in his gear. He just liked having fun, and that was infectious.
Hockey minds like to talk about how it’s important to sign guys to a team even if they are awful because they can bring a room together and it makes it fun for the players to be at the rink. Turns out you could just sign Jiří Hudler and get all of that without the baggage as well.
He would go on to win the Lady Byng award that season, and show up in typical Hudlerian fashion without shoes because he got too into Vegas before that was the typical shtick for NHLers. This guy was all vibes and I’m so thankful he gave them all to the Flames during such a bad time.
He would of course be traded away, and things got a little much for him. He would only play about 50 more games in the NHL after getting traded and there wasn’t much offence left in the tank. And then after not getting signed again in 2017, there was that whole business on the airplane where he hit up a flight attendant for cocaine, and then had an outburst and threatened to pee on the food carts on an overseas flight if he didn’t get that cocaine now. Looking back, there uhhhhhh may have been a reason he was so fun during his time in Calgary and we can certainly speculate as to what lessons he passed down to his linemates during his time here, but the lawyers and Scorchstack, Scorchstack, and Diamond are recommending this piece wraps up immediately.
Anyway, there you have it! Forever A Real One Jiří Hudler. Next week we look at the other bright spot during the bad time of the early 2010s.
Forever A Real One (lifetime achievement award) Michael Stone
That’s two Real Ones for the price of one issue you lucky ducks
by tibs (@decayinwtheboys)
The rules of our summer series are quite simple: we picked some of our favourite all-time Flames who weren’t quite significant/good enough to have their number retired or receive the lesser (higher?) designation of Forever A Flame. It’s essentially a summer-long love letter to the guys who don’t get appreciated enough by the Flames fan base and wouldn’t otherwise be appreciated had it not been for the Scorchstack: cornerstone of Flames discourse.
Naturally, this excluded Michael Stone, who was on an informal lifetime contract with the team and was almost certainly going to sign his $700,000 one-year deal in September. He was quite literally forever a Flame, ineligible by the letter of the law. And he’s since retired and actually become Forever a Flame, holding a vague development position with the team with no clear expectation or job performance metric other than “be chill, please.” In this way, he is like club legend Martin Gelinas as he is now wandering the halls of the Dome pretending to look busy, and will be until he decides to do something else since it’s kind of awkward to fire alumni.
Also like Gelly, Michael Stone scored some big goals. Less in the “iconic, fandom defining, played on loop forever in my memory” sense and more in the “right now would be a funny time for Michael Stone to score and holy shit he did it” sense, but we love him all the same. It was those big dumb heavy slapshots that were either going in the back of the net or seriously injuring a child in the crowd that got us swooning.
It is strange to think that this absolutely used to not be the case, it was almost certain that Michael Stone would go down as one of the least beloved Flames.
Let’s flashback to 2017 and throw a clumsy baseball metaphor in here. Brad Treliving is at the bat, looking to get on base.
Here comes the first pitch: the Flames -not convincingly a playoff team- decided that all of the problems, defensive depth was the one to overspend on and moved two picks for Stone. Mostly this was because Treliving knew him in Arizona. Strike one.
Alright, nothing you can’t work yourself out of, here comes the second pitch: with 19 so-so regular season games and four brutal playoff games, the Flames decided he was worth $10.5M over three years. Strike two.
Do or die time, can’t want to leave this plate appearance empty-handed: after that contract aged horribly after two seasons, he was bought out unceremoniously. Strike three.
And folks, that’s a classic Brad Treliving strikeout! Overpay by about 20% to address a depth issue, double down and overcommit on the contract, and then spend two dollars to save one to get yourself out of your entirely predictable mess. Stone should’ve gone down the routes of Troy Brouwer, Mason Raymond, and Lance Bouma. We should’ve seen long threads about how the negative -$1M contract value he was providing was the difference between the Flames and a Stanley Cup, not semi-ironic, semi-sincere appreciation for the third pairing defender with only one above-average skill.
What happened is that he pulled the unexpected move and decided to stay in Calgary, both getting paid to play and not play for the same club. Then he did it again. And again. And again. Blood clots, COVID, locker room drama, the team exploding and rebuilding itself, coaches resigning in disgrace, coaches getting fired, AHL demotions, the taxi squad, the entire roller coaster ride, the man stuck around. All he wanted to do was to play for the Calgary Flames at the cheapest possible point, blasting slapshots to his heart’s content for 10-13 minutes a game.
I don’t think Stone ever had an agent, because any agent worth their fee is telling him “look, someone will pay you three times as much on a longer contract, every GM in this league is stupid.” Maybe his agent did tell him that, but Stone’s heart was set in Calgary, ignoring the franchise’s perpetual falling apart that was happening around him just to lace ‘em up and fuck around for less than fifteen minutes at a time. In that respect, he is certainly the Flames player who I can relate to the most: head empty, no thoughts, just Calgary Flames hockey.
Stone is already Forever a Flame, but for his dedication to literally never leaving us, he gets the lifetime achievement award in the category of forever being a real one*
*I did not clear this with any other Scorchies.
Up Next Week
So you’re not going to believe this but there is actually a tie for 12th place in the rankings as well so it’s just cliffhanger after cliffhanger.
We check in with Elias Lindholm who has promised to tell us and only us what he’s up to these days. We won’t be breaking the NDA but that is what we will be doing.