Scorchstack Issue #34: We're shitting on your Gucci purse
Losing him was blue like I'd never known, but loving him was red.
Taylor Swift foreshadowed the end of the Tkachuk-Rittich era.
What’s inside?
Sam Bennett… gone? Could this be true? Well yes, it is. Were you not paying attention at all this week?
We say an even bigger heartfelt goodbye for Big Save Dave as we currently work on getting that name patented
Many are saying that Sam Bennett and Taylor Hall getting traded for identical packages is wild because one is Taylor Hall and the other is Sam Bennett. Ramz is here to prove why, actually, Sam Bennett is worth it because he’s better the Taylor Hall.
Scorchstack is now big business, and VP Head Of Business Ops and Future Development Mike is here to show you that exciting future.
Since last week
I believe the Flames actually won? Is that right? Did they go an entire week and not lose? Well, ain’t that something.
You missed a great Scorchstack, where we covered topics like whether you should keep watching the Flames, guys with the same last name, why the Flames are actually good, and Igor Larionov II and whether or not he’s real.
Turns out he is, and he sat down with us to clear some things up. Yes, that’s right, we accidentally did the podcast we kept threatening to do.
Big Monday Thing, how about Big Mournful Thing. Floob is sad.
Goodbye to Sam Bennett
This was written on Feb. 4th when we all thought he was getting traded. It stayed in the drafts as a eulogy and morphed into something about Rico Fata and then back to a eulogy with Rico Fata elements
by Christian (@decayinwtheboys)
Sam Bennett, we hardly knew ye. Or more specifically, we hardly knew the real ye.
There were many Sam Bennetts we knew, oftentimes contradictions of each other. We saw 18-year-old Sam Bennett, Playoff Sam Bennett, Regular Season Sam Bennett, Top Line RW Sam Bennett, Third Line LW Sam Bennett, Potential #1 Centre Sam Bennett, Skilled Sam Bennett, Physical Sam Bennett, Goon Sam Bennett, unable-to-do-a-pullup Sam Bennett, Powerplay Sam Bennett, Penalty Kill Sam Bennett, Sam Bennett with a moustache, Sam Bennett with a beard, Bald Sam Bennett, and all the other flavours of Sam Bennett I’ve probably forgotten.
Unfortunately, we only saw these different Sam Bennetts in independent bursts of seven-game stretches and never as the perfect complete package we were promised. There were only flashes of what we and the entire hockey world expected Sam Bennett to be, and not much more. With frustration from both the player, the team, and generally everyone who follows the Calgary Flames with regards to being stuck in neutral for many years, they parted ways with him.
Naturally, there’s going to be a lot of questions sometime soon about how the Flames took their highest-ever draft pick and got way less than expected for six seasons, especially in a year where it looks like they’re going to draft high again. In fact, that’s going to loom over the heads of not only this management team, but the next one, and the next one after that. A franchise never really gets over a draft bust.
You can hem and haw about how that happened if you really feel like it, but I think you’d be wasting your time because the questions already have answers. Was it the shoulder injury that took away 80% of his draft + 1 year? A lot of players get injured early on, and a lot of them succeed regardless. Was it the lack of OHL/AHL time? Sean Monahan and Matthew Tkachuk turned out as expected. Is there a flaw in the development model? The Flames churned out lesser players in Dillon Dube and Andrew Mangiapane to be more successful than Bennett.
Was it the revolving door of loser head coaches that had different ideas about how he should be used? More plausible, but other players had the same coaches and didn’t stall out the same way Bennett did (and also: was this an issue? Wasn’t Bennett a checking 3LW for 90% of the time he was here?). Was management trying their best when the best linemates they gave Sam were Mark Jankowski and Garnet Hathaway? Also plausible, but he also failed when paired with good linemates and never really showed much to deserve a promotion. Should the Flames have traded him when his value was higher? Well, was his value ever high, or was that just you thinking it was high despite all the evidence that, no, he was not a 1C? At least Monahan looked like he was a 1C at one point.
It’s both rare and more common than you think, but sometimes you just have to admit that a guy is bad and that every well-compensated hockey mind was fooled by them. Truthfully, Sam Bennett was Rico Fata if Rico Fata spent more than three seasons with the Calgary Flames. High expectations followed by low and diminishing rewards.
This is a bold assertion to make, as I was barely around for Rico Fata and do not know anything about him. I do not understand Rico Fata as anything other than a punchline for the 1994-2003 Calgary Flames era. I don’t know why he was bad, what he looked like on the ice, what people thought of him in the moment, or anything at all about him except that he was bad.
I don’t think anyone remembers anything about Rico Fata other than what Rico Fata symbolizes: the wasted years of prime Jarome Iginla and a team that was incompetent for a staggeringly long period of time from the bottom to one spot below Jarome Iginla. If you say “Rico Fata” to a Flames fan, they won’t be able to remember any particular moment from him (the only video of him with the Flames on YouTube is this 12-second clip of him getting his ass kicked in the preseason), what number he wore, which position he played, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s bile that rises to the back of the throat without fail. They won’t know what it is, but they understand completely.
Unlike another era-defining bust Daniel Tkaczuk, there’s no stated reason for why Fata was a failure. Tkaczuk took (according to forum posters) a Shane Doan skate and/or knee to the face and was never quite right after that, especially in the era where the concussion protocol was checking if the lights were still on and that brain wasn’t leaking out of your ear. Fata was just bad. He was supposed to be good, but he was bad. We will never know why he was bad, he just was.
It has happened before, and it has happened again. A player was bad and there’s nothing to learn from it, you just have to move on. Ten or fifteen years from now when this current roster is all retired, the internet users of the world will look back on the underwhelming 2014-202? era of the Calgary Flames and laugh. The punchline will be Sam Bennett.
No one’s going to remember much about him other than the Flames drafted him fourth overall and that he didn’t live up to that. My theory of typical hockey fan memory is that it only stretches back about 40 games, so maybe by next season, we’ll forget he ever played for this team.
And that’s a damn shame because Bennett was probably one of the most magical and easiest to fall in love with players on this current iteration of the Flames. His entire thing was chaos and violence, for better or worse, and that’s just pure entertainment. Those first two seasons where you could still rationally believe in that fourth overall potential were enough to keep it stuck in your craw that the Good Sam Bennett was just around the corner, far past the point where you should’ve stopped believing.
Remember him picking up his first NHL point on his very first shift? Or the birth of 18-Year-Old Sam Bennett when he introduced himself to the hockey world by looking like a seasoned vet despite playing his first few games in the NHL playoffs? This move in his rookie season that really made you believe? The four goal game? Beating up Jacob Trouba for no reason? Everything he ever did in the playoffs? Goddamn, this dude was electric.
Off-ice, he was a gem too. Remember this photo of him, Gaudreau, and Ferland? Despite the junior high dance aesthetic to it, this was the future of the Calgary Flames and it made folks want to run through a wall. Remember when he just wanted to get the world some cheap sunglasses? The (unfortunately deleted) Head and Shoulders ad he made even when his hairline was retreating at rapid speed? The lockdown (also unfortunately deleted) revelation that he knew how to play guitar but only knew Wonderwall? There’s been many loveable goofballs on this team, but I think Bennett’s above the rest in that regard.
A while ago, we did a thing on Flames we loved who sucked. Sam Bennett’s already on that list, but I would like to add him again. He sucks, his entire tenure with the Flames will act as a convenient symbol of the unlimited potential fizzling out into torturous mediocrity, and I love him because he’s bad at password security and was pure chaos without reward on ice. Emil Heineman could never.
Extremely Goodbye to David Rittich
We’re sorry you have to play for them now
by floob (@itlooksreal)
Here’s the thing about our very good friend David Rittich. In four years with Calgary, he stole our hearts and he stole the net, and he cemented himself as one of our Guys. There have been hundreds of professional hockey players who have worn the Flaming C over the years, and only a select few of them still get talked about on a day-to-day basis even today. Rittich has forced his way into that group, and the cool thing is that he was never supposed to be given the chance to do it.
We all felt the sting last week when Big Save Dave (copyright Christian Tiberi) flew to Toronto with his team, but diverted into the opposing team’s dressing room upon landing. We heard the stories about the flight full of long goodbyes, everyone on the Flames happy to be able to spend that time with their friend and say the things they wanted to say. It rips your heart out. But it’s a testament to Rittich himself that he made us fall in love with him enough to feel this way.
David Rittich signed with the Flames in 2016, a 24-year-old free agent from the Czech league who had put together a couple of okay seasons with Mlada Boleslav BK. From the beginning, everyone viewed him as unspectacular, a potential steady hand with Calgary’s AHL affiliate Stockton Heat. Goalie of the future Jon Gillies was already there, with Goalie of the Future Future Tyler Parsons on his way, so they just needed someone with experience around to take the net from time to time while the prospects worked their way up the system.
Perhaps if Jon Gillies had been able to demonstrate even one ounce of development, we wouldn’t be talking about this today. He had his injury setbacks, sure, and Parsons has been on his own journey throughout all of this, but Calgary was running a tandem of Mike Smith and Eddie Lack, who by this point was, unfortunately, proving his days as an NHL netminder were over. The situation was primed for a young goalie to claw his way in and earn his spot.
Which is, of course, exactly what happened, but it wasn’t one of the goalies that were supposed to do it. It was David Rittich. He was the most steady hand out of all the goaltenders coming up in the system, and that just could not be ignored. In 2017, the Flames traded Lack away to New Jersey for Dalton Prout, the only New Jersey Devil I could ever confidently conclude was a real person, and our good friend Dave was officially a Calgary Flame.
It didn’t take long for Rittich to endear himself with the fans. When he would take the net for the Flames (an increasingly frequent thing to happen as Mike Smith is Mike Smith), it was clear how much he was enjoying the ride. He was very boisterous in the crease, a stark contrast from Smith, a curmudgeon and asshole. He developed a very obvious rapport with his teammates, again the polar opposite of Smith, a curmudgeon and asshole, who was quite obviously always looking to see who he could blame the quickest for the latest goal against.
He was pretty good too! That obviously helped. Though head coach [redacted] was never quite able to name him the starting goalie, Rittich wrestled away the bulk of the starts for the 2018-2019 season, a year where the Flames would finish second overall in the entire NHL. Not that fans in the Saddledome have ever needed talent or results to show appreciation for someone who suits up for them, but it sure does help! Why Rittich was never truly given the starting netminder treatment over this time I’ll ever know, and Calgary’s performance against Colorado in the playoffs was so dismal that even Smith could not have been blamed for it, but it seemed very strange that he was never given his shot in the playoffs. Again, they still would have lost, but hey, you never know.
Either way, the Big Save Dave (copyright Christian Tiberi) era was on. Mike Smith went from baby to babyface, doing everyone a real solid by signing as a free agent with the Edmonton Oilers (thank you Mike!), and Rittich inked his own two-year deal to become the de facto starter in Calgary. It was an era marred by coronavirus shutdowns and tandems with Cam Talbot and Jacob Markstrom that tragically prevented this era from ever quite getting off the ground, but it certainly wasn’t without its highlights. Dave still became an All-Star and a fan favourite regardless. He might not have been the best goaltender we’ve ever seen, but he was a lot of fun, and he was ours.
He will always be remembered for his friendship and hockey hugs with Matthew Tkachuk, a now truly iconic pose in Calgary Flames lore, as well as this wonderful video that we don’t talk about enough:
One simple trick that will make Oilers fans lose their minds (they hate him!)
Celebrating an overtime winner from Johnny Gaudreau well before Gaudreau even scored it
This picture from a Czech calendar. I don’t know what is going on here but I sure can’t stop looking at it:
And who could ever forget the time he arranged a surprise meeting with Harvey the Hound for his brother Tomas:
You just have to love him. And we do. He might be one of them now, but in our hearts we still know he’s one of ours. Wherever David Rittich goes from here, all of us at The Scorchstack will be cheering for him. Please don’t go to Edmonton.
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Go listen to that Igor Larionov thing, it’s really good.
Why Sam Bennett is better than Taylor Hall
I’ve really done it this time
by Ramz (@ramzreboot)
Sam Bennett was finally traded (it was inevitable) just as the trade deadline was coming to a close. He was traded to the Florida Panthers along with a 2022 sixth-round draft pick and in return the Flames got a 2022 second-round draft pick and prospect Emil Heineman. Do you know what this means?
He was traded for more than Taylor Hall.
Taylor Hall!
For context, Hall and Curtis Lazar were traded to the Boston Bruins for Anders Bjork and a 2021 second-round draft pick. AND Buffalo retained half of Hall’s salary. Incredible. What a blessed day.
Note: When looking at the exact trade, the first headline I found was titled “Bruins take advantage of Sabres in Taylor Hall trade” lol.
You know what all this means, right? It’s time for my infamous “Why Player A who is absolutely and objectively not better than Player B is actually better than Player B because I decided that they are” bit. It’s time for why Sam Bennett is actually better than Taylor Hall.
First of all, he was traded for more, so, already a point for Bennett. 1-0 Bennett.
Bennett, at one point, played on the same team as Curtis Lazar. However, he no longer plays with Curtis Lazar. Taylor Hall was playing with Lazar and you’d think with a trade he could get away from him. However, they were both traded together, so Hall still players with Lazar. That’s a point to Bennett for not having to currently play with Lazar. More on that, Hall will forever be associated with Lazar for this trade. Bennett on the other hand will never be associated with Lazar to that extent. Another point to Bennett.
Hall once posted a photo to his IG story of his girlfriend rollerblading with the caption, “Breeding material💪”. Sam Bennett on the other hand has never once posted the caption “breeding material” with any of his partners, and I think I can safely assume he will not ever do that. Point to Bennett.
In a game of hangman, Hall couldn’t guess that the blanks here: “bannana s__i_” spelled out the word split. However, I’m not sure if Bennett could guess that either seeing how hockey players don’t have too much intelligence. Neither gets a point for this.
Taylor Hall has repeatedly failed his boaters license. We’re not sure if Bennett has ever attempted his boating license. I’ve tried looking it up, but I can’t seem to find an answer. However, Bennett has never posted about failing his boaters license (an open book test, by the way) which is less embarrassing. Point to Bennett.
Taylor Hall once allegedly offered to buy a girl a Gucci purse if she did anal with him. I know what you’re thinking, I’m going to give a point to Bennett for this. But actually, no. Why do anal for free when you could get a Gucci purse in return? That’s a point to Hall, meaning he’s now trailing 5-1.
Taylor Hall doesn’t understand how bathrooms work:
We have yet to be proven that Bennett doesn’t know what a bathroom is. Point to Bennett.
Hall deleted this Tweet because he’s a coward, point to Bennett for that. Another point to Bennett for not getting into a car accident because he was distracted by a ‘manikin’. However, while Hall deleted that Tweet, we can’t forget about Bennett deleting the hundreds of Tweets letting people know they can get sunglasses for only $19.99.
Bennett loses a point for deleting all those Tweets. However, credit to him for offering every single one of his followers $19.99 fashion sunglasses, 75% off. I’m not seeing Taylor Hall offering his fans deals like that. Bennett gains his point back.
Upon further investigation, it seems like Bennett actually didn’t delete most of those Tweets, so I lose a point for my mistake and Bennett gets another point.
Based on my calculations, Bennett wins 9-1 meaning he’s 9x better than Taylor Hall. Sorry folks, the math checks out.
See ya, Bennett, I’ll miss having a player 9x as good as Taylor Hall.
The Scorchstack Network is Growing
People said we wouldn't make it and boy-howdy were they wrong.
by Mike (@mikepfeil_)
Now that we’ve passed our eight-month birthday as the greatest, most-subscribed to newsletter when it comes to the Calgary Flames, we have to talk next steps as an organization. Before we do that let’s go down memory lane, shall we?
We’ve accomplished a lot of amazing things in such a short window like our recent interview with Igor Larionov II, who deserves a PTO; spending several thousands of dollars reviewing Theo Fleury’s country album with the goal of achieving the most sonic and introspective review known to mankind; The Big Monday, the most important Monday-centered column ever written; and countless other classics that everyone should read.
What’s next you ask? The Scorchstack readers, the most intelligent and wonderful humans on this miserable piss rock, want a podcast. Well, you’re in luck because we will be doing a podcast in the near future. We are promising not one, but two podcasts for you. The first will be a free version, full of ads (we’re talking like 80% ads), and will be available once a month. The second is a premium version behind a paywall with only one ad. When is this launching? We’re not telling you.
Second: we need sponsors with actual cash flow or products we can promote. Are we going to be honest and use these products? No. We’re all busy with real-life matters like trying to work through the emotions of a David Rittich-less Flames team. Will we promote your snake oil for money?
Yes. So the next step for The Scorchstack Network (TSN) is we want money and we’ll sell you readers down the river for it.
Lots of kids these days love Twitch and streamers. A 2019 survey mentioned US children want to be a Vlogger or a Youtuber. We know in 2021 kids want to be Scorchies which means we’re pivoting to video sometime in Q3 of 2021. Our current game plan is to play games and maybe produce video content. You might wonder how we’ll schedule this and the truth is we’ll do it when we feel like. Scorchstack is unpredictable like a puppy who isn’t housetrained yet.
One minute we’re doing something cute, the next we’re shitting on your Gucci purse. That’s the Scorchstack brand, baby.
Now you’re probably thinking “Mike, this is so great! I can’t believe the Scorchstack has this many content avenues to go down. You obviously have one more announcement to share with me, the incredibly intelligent Scorchstack reader, right?” The answer to that is yes. We’re going to launch a lifestyle merchandising and clothing brand. Lululemon is a thing of the past because Scorchstack Active Wear is slated for Q4 of 2021.
You’ll be able to get a Scorchstack branded pair of leggings to wear around the house, but that you wear out to socially distant brunch dates with your friends where you say you wear them on runs but really the only run you’ve done is to the toilet after eating expired yogurt in the fridge.
The Scorchstack Network (TSN) is the future and we are excited for you to be a part of it.
Up Next Week
The Flames play a lot of games against the Habs, which will either lure us into the false hope that this team is a playoff team or crush our dreams really, really fast. Fun to find out, either way.
Off the heels of unnamed yet successful Scorchstack podcast episode #1, we are all definitely heading to the studio to record episode #2. We’ll let you know when it’s available.