Happy birthday to Mikael Backlund, Eetu Tuulola, and also Ireland, if I’m reading this right.
What’s inside?
The Flames are doing well, but they could be even better, and it could all be thanks to a boy named Bubba
Chris Tanev, good? Yes. Why? Extremely unclear.
Take a walk through Flames history with some of the most iconic photos of the boys in red.
Uh oh, you forgot that you had a lab report due in Ms. Walsh’s Chem 20. Luckily, we have provided one for you. Shhh don’t tell anyone.
Since last week
3-0. Undefeated in the Darryl Sutter era, baby. The new old boss began his second tenure with a prototypical 2-1 win against the Habs, followed by a 3-1 win and a 4-3 win in his return to the battle of Alberta.
In slightly related news, everything is beautiful again and nothing hurts.
Another gangbusters week for the Scorchstack and all that content you love. There was issue #29, where we branched into investigative journalism with our look into what farms are. Many vermiculturalists would prefer if you never read this!
Francis Ericsson returned to the Scorchstack to pontificate about his favourite (?) subject, Johnny Gaudreau. This week: is he fit for fatherhood?
We tried to silence the Big Monday Thing, but the Big Monday Thing simply wouldn’t have it.
If You’re Reading This Message, It’s Time To Call Up Matthew Phillips
he’s cool!
by Floob (@itlooksreal)
We all know in our hearts that the Flames are never going to lose a game ever again. That’s canon. Darryl Sutter rode into town on a Kubota M6H Tractor (that’s more horsepower than the M5, you know), and his brand of b̶o̶r̶i̶n̶g relentless hockey has been propelling the team to newfound heights.
It’s a nice feeling. Calgary is undefeated since he and his poorly-fitting mask took up patrol behind the bench in this latest go-around with the Flames, and they’ve looked convincing over that time, choking the Canadiens into submission, and holding Connor McDavid to an inconsequential assist. There’s not a lot to complain about.
Or so we thought! But just like a fine Kubota Tractor, we can always carry a little bit more.
The issue here is - surprise! - depth. The new style the Flames are employing is very effective, but having some more skill and speed across the lineup would truly fill the tank on this whole experiment. It’s not like this is an overall weakness on the team, we’ve all seen what Johnny Gaudreau can do, but some short-term success does shine a light on some darker corners of team makeup.
I actually like Brett Ritchie a lot. I think he’s a functional 4th line player who works out just fine playing 7-8 minutes a night in low leverage situations. Unfortunately, as we’re all well aware, Ritchie is now a featured piece on the Flames de facto goal-scoring line with Gaudreau and Sean Monahan. Low leverage, this is not.
This is not a shot at Ritchie, it’s just concerning that there isn’t anyone else to put in that spot. After a rocky start, Dillon Dube has found a home with Matthew Tkachuk and Elias Lindholm (we should all be so lucky, damn), and Andrew Mangiapane clearly shares a brain with Mikael Backlund. Josh Leivo is a better option on that line, but he’s IDEALLY suited for the role Milan Lucic is playing on the line I refuse to call 3M, and he has auditioned to share the ice with 23-13 before, and I suppose no one was particularly impressed. Sam Bennett and Brett Ritchie are the same person. So here we are.
You’re like “well I guess we’re just out of people”. Not so! This One Weird Trick could solve a lot of problems. Call up Matthew Phillips! Defenders hate him!
Friends, do you like Andrew Mangiapane? I do too! What if the Flames had two of him? Human cloning has yet to prove effective at copying an entire man’s genetics, and there are a lot of ethical considerations to unpack before we truly explore it further, but in Matthew Phillips, we already have as close a facsimile to Mangiapane as we could ever need.
Sure, Phillips is only 5’7”, but his nickname is Bubba, so you tell me who’s small here? The 23-year-old hometown kid is a finesse player with speed to burn, strong at centre and on the wing, can REALLY pass a puck, and has shown an ability to carry the offense at every level he’s played at. He’s basically an incredibly dependable and efficient Kubota Tractor on ice, and on the last year of his entry-level contract, he’s priced like one as well.
I just want to keep on the Phillips is Mangiapane thread for just a touch longer. Despite Phillips playing center while the Bread Boy is a natural winger, they have had remarkably similar pre-NHL careers. Mangiapane had a sparkling 1.33 point per game run over three seasons with Barrie in the OHL. Phillips? 1.3 points per game on — and I can vouch for this personally — an otherwise barren Victoria team in the WHL. Mangiapane was a 0.87 point per game guy in Stockton, whereas to date, Phillips is on a 0.75 point per game clip, and is basically the reason why we still all seem to remember who Adam Ruzicka is.
We don’t have a lot of publicly available analytics on junior or minor league hockey to expand on this further, but you get the point. Even just using the eye test you can decipher these guys are basically the same. Hell, they were even drafted in the exact same spot one year apart. I’m not a conspiracy guy but something is obviously going on in Brad Treliving’s office, and we need to investigate it, you know, once the cloning stops working.
Matty Phillips is tied with the aforementioned Ruzicka for the Stockton Heat lead in scoring, and is tied for 10th overall in the AHL in total. I looked up AHL numbers, so you know I’m serious here.
All this to say that the Flames have an affordable and versatile injection of offense ready to go at any time. He’s even sharing the same ice surface right now with Stockton plying their trade at the Saddledome this season. This is a smart player who would fit in with Gaudreau and Monahan better than almost anyone else they could put with those two right now, and given that the pair already play some fairly sheltered minutes mostly in the offensive zone, I really can’t think of a much more ideal way to bring a rookie forward into the show. I think Darryl Sutter’s brain could find A LOT for that trio to do, and it’s very exciting.
People will suggest having two small forwards on a line is going to lead to them being pushed around by larger opponents, but those same people would rather own a Case IH machine instead of a far more reliable and aesthetically-pleasing Kubota. Every small forward the Flames have brought in have all adjusted to the NHL game extremely well, what’s one more? Phillips did suffer a pretty gnarly knee injury last season, and there were concerns that he might not be the same player on the other side of his recovery, but early returns suggest, uh, nope. An extended COVID offseason might have actually been a benefit for Phillips, suggesting he can turn just about anything into gold.
I know this entire article has been one giant heaped praise, and it seems a lot more subjective than you would maybe like, and yeah, you would be right about that. Matthew Phillips was starting out in Victoria right around the time I moved to the city, and I’ve been on his bandwagon since that time. He’s just such a dynamic player, and I really, REALLY believe in him. I am excited for him to show everyone why the Flames were right to bet on him, and I don’t think there’s a better time than right now for him to do it.
Chris Tanev Is Inexplicably Good
I don't know what to call this, sorry if the title sucks. Basically, pointing out that Chris Tanev was bad before and is suddenly great.
by Christian (@decayinwtheboys)
Before this 2021 season started, there were plenty of excellent reasons to be skeptical about Chris Tanev. They are as follows:
He was 31-years-old and had missed time just about every season with injuries.
Tanev’s hard-nosed playing style is also the worst thing to pair with a body in decline that frequently breaks.
By both analytics and the eye test, he was clearly declining on ice. Even before Canucks fans had a reason to be bitter about him, they were pretty upset to see him fading into dust.
Tanev was likely to be paired with Hanifin, who looked like he was never going to put it together and would be stuck in the mediocre zone for his entire career. Hanifin also previously struggled to get anything going with Travis Hamonic, a player that wasn’t all that different from Tanev.
Tanev was also previously paired with Quinn Hughes, the Calder runner-up and someone pegged to be at the forefront of the NHL’s next generation of great defencemen. If he looked like trash next to a budding superstar, it would be a problem for a team that didn’t have a defenceman in the same postal code.
Brad Treliving’s defenceman transaction history - trading Dougie Hamilton on a bargain contract (and throwing in extremely promising Adam Fox just because) for pre-2021 Noah Hanifin, trading a first and two seconds for three seasons of a past-his-prime Travis Hamonic, signing Deryk Engelland to a 3x2.9M contract, keeping Michael Stone around forever, trading away Brett Kulak for peanuts, acquiring random defenders for “depth” at trade deadline when the team had more pressing needs and also some depth defencemen, and other sins - signaled that he may not actually know what he was doing when it came to the blueline.
Also, any long-term contract Treliving hands out on the first day of free agency falls apart after about a month in Flames’ silks, especially when the other party is 30+ years old. Among other things, he values veteran leadership and past performance ahead of sensible projections of what these players might be by the halfway point of their contracts, nevermind the full duration.
Nothing good ever happens for the Calgary Flames.
I don’t think I’m subconsciously using hyperbole here or revising history to suit the narrative of this piece: all of these things were true, and they indicated bad things for what was to come for Tanev. There wasn’t any good reason other than “well, it could be fine” to be optimistic about the aging, declining defenceman signed by a GM who has a poor track record of free agency signings specifically because he keeps signing those types of players.
When you add all of these inputs together, the output is a contract you start regretting before the first year is done. Somehow, it has resulted in one of the NHL’s best defencemen this season.
There’s no card hidden up my sleeve that explains why he actually sucks, I don’t have anything to complain about for once. Tanev is good-good. He actually looks great on ice, which far exceeds my hopes of “don’t be noticeably shitty,” and he’s an analytics darling to boot. He leads Flames defencemen in CF% and ranks 28th out of the 164 NHL defencemen who have played at least 250 5v5 minutes this year. Also, he’s doing this with the toughest matchups and second-worst zone starts (next to Hanifin) on the team. Again, good-good.
The thing is that I don’t have an explanation for it, either. This chart is Tanev’s Corsi against/60, Fenwick against/60, shots against/60, and scoring chances against/60 while he was in Vancouver. If you aren’t stats literate, basically we’re measuring how often opponents were able to direct pucks towards Chris Tanev’s net while Chris Tanev was on the ice:
What this means is that Tanev’s opponents were more and more able to get shots and chances against him as his career went along. For a defenceman, that’s not what you would like to see. His job was to prevent that from happening and he did not do that.
That chart lends itself to an easy explanation: as Tanev got older and thus slower and more banged up due to his injuries, his overall quality declined and he was no longer able to keep up with the younger, faster, and more talented NHL players coming in. He was following the natural lifecycle of every NHL players: young guy succeeds in the league until the league surpasses him. This happens to everyone, nothing to see here.
Now here’s the same chart with his Calgary year added:
I don’t think you need to be analytics savvy to know that this is not supposed to happen. The best-case scenario for a player that’s trending in the wrong direction as they get older is that they just level off at a tolerable level of shitty instead of getting shittier. They do not suddenly put up similar or better numbers than they did at age 21. There are many cases where people put up career seasons late in their career, but nothing this dramatic.
The PHWA scribes of this world might chalk this up to the eye test taking another victory over the analytics, the numbers didn’t see why Tanev was good and what not. I think it’s a tired argument, but let’s disprove it anyways: these stats are a measure of things happening on ice, and they’re the reason Canucks fans soured on Tanev’s play even if they couldn’t put a number to it. You can observe a defenceman allowing more shots and scoring chances against than his teammates, that’s what these lines mean: they’re a measure of Tanev getting worse as a defenceman.
I appreciate the improvement for what it is, but why it happened is a bit of a mystery. Aging curves in hockey don’t apply the same to everyone, but there’s rarely a case where someone aging just like the rest of the league does bucks that trend in the seasons where the decline really should start becoming apparent.
The most convincing explanation I’ve seen comes from this hockey substack post, which goes into greater detail about how Tanev has rebounded. To sum it up, the reason Tanev may have looked bad in Vancouver was that his sturdy, structured game clashed to the extreme with Quinn Hughes’ free-wheeling, puck-moving style, and exacerbated by the Canucks basing their entire game around that style. This led to more turnovers in the neutral zone and more rush chances against, and the responsibility mostly fell on Tanev to clean up his entire team’s mess. In a perfect storm for Hughes, none of that ever reflected on him. Now that Tanev’s gone, his defensive numbers have cratered, suggesting that Tanev was bearing the brunt of the defensive failures of the Canucks.
With the Flames, he found a partner in Hanifin that could still move the puck but not commit as many errors as Hughes did, slowing down the pace to suit Tanev’s game while also reducing the number of times he had to face perilous circumstances. The things that people criticized Hanifin for - not being speedy or skilled enough as his peers and lacking a solid defensive game- worked perfectly for a partner like Tanev, who couldn’t succeed in a high-octane system that attempted to increase the reward by increasing the risk.
But there’s also flaws with that explanation. Tanev was already in noticeable decline before Hughes was his partner, even when he played with the more conventional Alex Edler the year before, and the unspectacular Ben Hutton and Michael Del Zotto the year prior. If you look at the charts, his decline starts in the 2016-17 season, three years before Hughes would join the league. He may have looked even worse with Hughes, but he was looking bad before too (his WOWY numbers suggest that his teammates were better away from Tanev than with him).
It also doesn’t explain how Hanifin became an excellent defenceman out of nowhere, or why he’s now succeeding with a shutdown type in Tanev where he previously failed with Travis Hamonic. With five full seasons under his belt and little-to-no progress, it was fair to think that Hanifin was what he was: a moderately effective offensive defenceman with a habit of switching his brain off in the defensive zone. There’s not really a fix for that (as short-lived experiments with Rasmus Andersson showed in the playoffs), it’s a player issue that doesn’t get corrected by giving them a new partner.
But yet Hanifin is also better, both visually and by the numbers. I can’t really think of a single Noah Hanifin moment that stands out, or even a brutal Hanifin defensive zone giveaway at the worst possible time (though I have erased significant portions of this season from my memory already, and I trust that I won’t be called on it because everyone else has too). Really, the only explanation I have for it is the math rule that a negative times a negative equals a positive.
And the largest point is that none of this really explains the scale of Tanev’s transformation. Saying someone’s having a bounceback season implies that they get back to the same level as good as they were previously: Tanev’s never been better. Did it really take ten years for someone to figure out how to use him correctly, and the someone who figured it out was Geoff Ward? That’s the most bizarre part to me: Geoff Ward turned back the clock on a seemingly washed player where he seemed to be making everyone else worse. The Flames defence became more passive and less structured with the recently departed at the helm, and somehow Tanev emerged as the rock from the shrug emoji of a defensive system. Kinda scary to think what might be coming now that Darryl Sutter is here to install the opposite of that.
Could it really be that every narrative and stat about Chris Tanev for the last three years was wrong? Maybe! He’s still old and has a fragile body, so who knows how long the good times last, but I suppose we’ll just have to live in the moment. Chris Tanev is great, don’t bother wondering why.
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Mike bought a vintage Flames calendar, and you better believe we’re going to plunder that bad boy for whatever content we can get out of it. Um, I mean, real Scorchstack sponsor Corey Stillman is here to sell you bikes. “I love riding my bike, especially when the seat is way too high up” real testimonial from Corey Stillman.
The Top Pictures In Calgary Flames History
You like pictures? We got pictures.
by Ramina (@ramzreboot)
I love pictures. I do not like text. Mainly because I do not know how to read. Here are ten of the best pictures in Flames history. If I missed a picture you wanted to be included please send an email to shutthefuckup@outlook.com. I will definitely read it, I care about your opinion on this.
10.
Johnny were in class dude
9.
“What are you guys doing?”
“It’s Retro Night.”
8.
Zombie Harvey. For those who may not know, this was a dismembered Harvey the Hound head after the 2013 Southern Alberta floods. This was a picture that was taken for some reason.
7.
There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t think about Seany Gaudreau and John Monahan at least once. This picture has impacted me in ways I cannot describe.
6.
The true definition of the circle of life.
5.
One of the best locker room photos of all time.
4.
Three Jaromes in a row, that’s called influence. Jarome, thank you for this photo it lives rent-free in my brain. The entire young guns calendar from 1998-99 can probably take up ten spots if we’re being honest.
3.
It’s sweaty Lanny with a cup, what else do you want me to say?
2.
How could I not, it’s the whole basis of the Scorchstack. The headline for when this happened was, “Calgary Flames AHL affiliate apologizes for Flame mascot that horrifyingly 'overpowers' a firefighter” which is objectively extremely good.
1.
I cannot describe this, it’s too good.
Synthesizing Physical Chemistry in Controlled Ice Environment
The Scientific Evaluation of the Reaction from Mikael Backlund and Matthew Tkachuk Synergizing on Solid Ice
by Konnie (@konnie49)
Problem: With Matthew Tkachuk struggling recently and the Flames under new coach Darryl Sutter, would it benefit the team in the long run to reunite the pairing of Tkachuk and Mikael Backlund?
Hypothesis: Backlund is very good at hockey, and so is Tkachuk. To maximize the effectiveness of the latter, combing him with the former on a line has proven to be very efficient in the past at not only driving play, but at shutting down the opponent as well. The Flames have recently hired Darryl Sutter, who is famously known for being a very defensively minded coach, and by having a historically good defensive pairing that is known for driving play against the hardest competition, Sutter can effectively stack the matchups in his favour.
Experimental Design: Using his voice through a mask that is PROPERLY worn, Darryl Sutter is able to activate the chemistry between Backlund and Tkachuk by telling them to hit the ice together on the same line. Our controlled variables are the players themselves, the ice surface that they will be playing on, and the team that the Flames are currently playing against.
Procedure:
Play Backlund and Tkachuk on the same line
Achieve Success
Equation: After completing the steps seen in the procedure, we are left with the results as seen in the following chemical reaction equation below.
Where:
Mt is 1 mol of Matthew Tkachuk
Mb is 1 mol of Mikael Backlund
H20 is water but in solid form
and Su is 1 mol of Success
Diagram:
Observation Chart:
Charts from Natural Stat Trick
Analysis:
To calculate the amount of Su₍ₛ₎ we receive from this chemical reaction, we want to measure the shot attempts and expected goals as those variables in which we can judge the success of Backlund and Tkachuk together. From 2016-17 (Tkachuk’s first season) to 2019-2020, Tkachuk and Backlund have both shot generating machines together since they were all on the 3M line with Michael Frolik.
The same goes for the expected goals, as they have been one of the league leaders in generating chances and goals, even when they are facing some of the hardest competition in the league. As such, when Tkachuk and Backlund are combined, large levels of Su₍ₛ₎ are being produced.
Conclusion:
Yeah, of course Backlund and Tkachuk are going to be really successful together and you don’t need a high school effort level chemistry lab report to tell you that. I get not wanting to move Lindholm away from the top shutdown role, but it’s not currently working as well as the management staff may have hoped for. In the meantime for hard matchups, you can go to what has worked in the past and have Tkachuk-Backlund do really well in the shutdown role, while also having a Lindholm line that can be put into a better position to succeed. To be any good in this league, having three lines contribute to the best of their abilities is key.
FINAL GRADE: 40% (See me after class)
Up Next Week
Games against Edmonton and Toronto. Oh boy, doesn’t that sound like high-stakes fun.
Scorchstack is getting into the nonfungible token game. You now have the chance to own any sentence in Scorchstack history for $3,000. We’re trying to retire early.
We are proud to announce the start of the official Gofundme campaign to help pay for the acquisition of Rickard Rakell