ScorchStack Issue #60 - Has anyone done any research into if Swedes are generally hot people?
Darryl Sutter is the movie equivalent of when the nerd removes her glasses and all of a sudden she's not wearing glasses
Calgary Flames aren’t ass anymore. What the damn is going on?
What’s inside?
Are the Flames…..good? More and more people are asking the question and we give you the answer.
Overtime 2 is off to a roaring success, but also led us down a bizarre rabbit hole of one former Flame, and how PEOPLE magazine has been at the centre of a scandal of extremely minimal proportions.
We asked you who the hottest Flame was, and then you told us, so now we’re telling you about what you told us.
How do you solve a problem like Nikita? We asked our #1 Russian expert on what to do with Zadorov.
Also Ramz finally gave the haters what they wanted to delved deep into the new Analytic stat that everyone is talking about.
Since last issue
ScorchStack Issue #59 was released where, among other things, we said “The Flames went 0-1-1 but they didn’t look horrible doing it so trust the process or whatever,” so chalk one up for us.
Speaking of big wins, the Big Monday Thing has returned for the season and it’s Bigger, Mondayer, and Thinger than ever.
Oh yeah and the Flames won four in a row.
The Calgary Flames - good?
It's okay if you don't understand what's going on right now, no one else really does either
by Tibs (@decayinwtheboys)
The Calgary Flames are 4-1-1, which is the best ever start to a Calgary Flames season in franchise history. Of course, I did not fact-check that statement, but given how the Flames are famously slow out of the gate every October, I feel confident that I’m right.
4-1-1 doesn’t mean much in the grand scope of an 82-game season, but that record is hitting different this time around. The current four-game win streak they’re on doesn’t feel fraudulent, the Flames are actually dominating teams. With the exception of the Washington game, they haven’t been eking out one-goal games or holding on for overtime. They’ve only been outshot twice this season, both in games where the final score was settled early on (Detroit, New Jersey). You don’t want to get too high on beating non-playoff teams like the Wings, Rangers, and Devils, but it feels like some sort of progress that the Flames crushed them right from puck drop where previous iterations might’ve severely underwhelmed. They’ve actually scored multiple goals in a period, and in different games too. Does that even sound like the Calgary Flames to you?
What we thought would be good is now great. Elias Lindholm looks like a true #1C with exceptional scoring prowess and strong two-way play instead of just a sturdy RW meant to provide defensive stability. The line with him, Matthew Tkachuk, and Johnny Gaudreau is a scoring chance machine (Scorchstack brought you the 3M moniker, so we reserve first rights to nicknaming them). Cherish the last remaining moments of Andrew Mangiapane being exclusively our secret, because he’s about to become a league-wide sensation. Rasmus Andersson has quietly bounced back. Blake Coleman has had an immediate impact. Oliver Kylington, as floob explained in the return of Big Monday Thing, has gone from “well hopefully he plays in 50% of the games” to legit top-four defender playing significant 5v5 minutes. He pushed out Nikita Zadorov after two games! That’s a miracle, I thought he would just inexplicably stick around for 82 games and then four more years afterward for some reason.
Even the bad is at least tolerable. A Lucic-Monahan-Lewis line sounds like the world’s worst idea but is somehow all right. Erik Gudbranson has mostly played somewhere in between the Alrightbranson to Gudbranson range, maybe the biggest surprise of this young season. Zadorov is even providing positive contributions from the press box.
Your natural pessimism honed from years of being a Flames fan is almost certainly creeping in: good things don’t happen to the Calgary Flames. I can both confirm and rebuke those feelings. Yeah, Mangiapane and Lindholm aren’t going to lead the NHL in goals forever, they’re not going to keep scoring on 30%+ of their shots, and it’s a little concerning that only two guys on this team have all of the goals. There’s going to come a time where they take a nap for an entire period and it really comes back to bite them in the ass. Erik Gudbranson will become the Erik Gudbranson we all know and love at some point. Kylington will make one (1) mistake and eat popcorn until March. You’re right, good things don’t last forever, and .750 points percentage teams especially do not last forever. We haven’t even played the Ottawa Senators yet, the true litmus test of any Flames team (but thankfully, we don’t play them nine times).
But your eyes aren’t deceiving you: the Flames are kicking ass out there and they’ve been pretty consistent with their ass-kickings (granted, six games). They are doing all the things that playoff hockey teams do. I’m not going to bog down this article with a bunch of numbers, but they rank in the top ten - and sometimes in the top three - in many of those all-important 5v5 score-adjusted shot metrics (they only rank outside the top ten in high danger chances, something that I’m sure keeps Sutter up at night). Generally, when your team is out-shooting, out-chancing, and out-scoring opponents, they tend to win a lot of games. Not that hard at all to understand.
After a pretty glum offseason that went from the highs of maybe coming close to potentially acquiring Jack Eichel to the very real lows of giving Erik Gudbranson money to play on an NHL hockey team in the year of our Lord 2021, there was always going to be a negative aura hovering over the Flames fanbase, one that I’m not even sure can be cleared by a rock-solid start to the season. But you have to remove that negativity from your life: the Calgary Flames are good. We are witnessing a good team play good hockey.
Ramz’ weekly analytics report
We support advanced stats here at ScorchStack
by Ramz (@ramzreboot)
Bones days: 2-1-1, +1 goal differential
No Bones days: 2-0-0, +5 goal differential
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Investigating Matthew Lombardi
Now that Ramz is no longer anti-Italian, she’s catching up on all their conspiracies from before
by Ramz (@ramzreboot)
Hi Scorchstack team. As you may or may not know, we’ve been running “Overtime 2” on Twitter spaces after the games. A completely original idea that we thought of. We sometimes go on tangents on these, like when Scorchie Nathan was getting heated about why he thought Vin Diesel should have a chance at coaching the Flames or if we’d fuck Darryl Sutter.
Do these convos sound fun? Then listen in on Overtime 2. No, I will give you no other context to those fun conversations. Looks like you’ll have to just listen in.
In Overtime on Saturday, Scorchie Nathan brought up the voting for the Hottest Flame and someone mentioned that they’d like to give a shoutout to former Flame Matthew Lombardi.
Oh boy, did this open a can of worms.
Let me take you through our journey.
First, I googled “Matthew Lombardi” to, of course, see if he was hot, thinking this was going to be a simple Google search. But when you go to images, these come up:
I know it’s hard to tell because white men look the same, but there are two different men here. So I thought, “Hey, what’s going on here? Are there two Matthew Lombardis?” And sure enough, there was.
Now, this is the description of one of the Lombardis Matthew on Google:
Clearly, it says the spouse is Joannie Lombardi. However, in that first photo above, we saw a couple of images linked to articles on PEOPLE Magazine. In one of those articles, it says “Former hockey player Matt Lombardi is opening up about the end of his engagement with Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin.”
This led to two possibilities: Either the Matt Lombardi who has a spouse was also engaged to Nastia Liukin, or there are two hockey-playing Matt Lombardis. So I did more digging.
I found this Instagram page for the user mattlombardi24. This is clearly the guy in the photo with Nastia Liukin. His bio says he’s an entrepreneur (whatever that means) and he’s the co-founder of a company called Beam, a health & wellness website, again, whatever that means. Wait a second, what’s this:
That’s a photo of him clearly playing hockey at Boston College. So he really is a hockey player. Now, Scorchie Floob cares about investigative journalism and found proof of two former players named Matt Lombardi. He found their Hockey DB profiles, one is 39 years old (former Flame), the other is 33 (the entrepreneur).
The entrepreneur is the one who was engaged to Nastia Liukin. However, there was another PEOPLE Magazine article about their breakup (I don’t know why PEOPLE Magazine is obsessed with their breakup). In this article from 2018, they wrote, “Last month, a rep for Liukin confirmed to PEOPLE that she and Lombardi, 36, ‘amicably ended their relationship.’”
Did you catch that?
“She and Lombardi, 36.” This shocked me to my very core. As we know, right now in October of 2021, entrepreneur Matt Lombardi is 33 and Matthew Lombardi is 39. Meaning back in 2018, Matthew Lombardi would have been 36. So, was Nastia actually dating former Flame Matthew Lombardi!?!?!?!?!? I found another PEOPLE Magazine article from 2018 about their split (again, not sure why they’re so obsessed with it) and it says, “During their relationship, Liukin and the former professional ice hockey player, 36, launched an ‘inspirational app for gymnasts’ together called Grander Sports.” Alright chill, entrepreneur Matt Lombardi played two seasons in the ECHL. Let’s slow down on the “professional ice hockey player,” there guys. But, did you catch that? They again referenced his age as being 36.
This is the biggest mystery I’ve ever encountered. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. Something had to be done.
I put my thinking cap on and after going through social media, the internet, Googling “what is hockey?” I came to a conclusion. PEOPLE Magazine fucked up.
They simply Googled, “Matt Lombardi”, saw the name and profile of the former Calgary Flame, didn’t think that him having a spouse and also looking like a different dude was alarming at all, and went with it. They thought he was engaged to Nastia Liukin. Not only did the first article of the breakup have two authors, but the second article had a different author. That means three people did zero research on this. Yes, I’m calling you out Sarah Michaud, Joelle Goldstein, and Char Adams.
The overall conclusion to this story is that Scorchstack is more reputable than PEOPLE Magazine and we actually do the research and the investigating before making wild unchecked claims. Looks like we care about journalistic integrity. Can’t say the same for PEOPLE.
While I appreciate the existence of the Matt Lombardi Extended Universe, please don’t ever do this to me again, Overtime 2 listeners.
Who is the hottest Flame this year?
Really thought this would be a fun distraction to how the team is doing at this point, but hey now it’s just extra fun
by Nathan (@hanoten)
Wow, this is quite the hot start from the Calgary Flames. Well, in theory. At 4-1-1, they’ve only gathered .750 of the points available to them. If you were telling your friend about a potential new beau, and said they were only a 7.5/10, you would certainly be kind, but no one is mistaking that for being an outright hottie.
Thankfully after polling you, dear readers, we know that there are some studs on the Flames, and we’re not talking about their on-ice performance. Well, except for Elias Lindholm. Damn, he truly has it all.
There are simply too many Flames for Google Forms to display them all at once, so allow us to give you a high-level overview of what you want to know.
Elias Lindholm has been dubbed the hottest Flame for this year, garnering 27 of the 83 votes cast. In fact, in the write-in portion of the survey, there was a response that just read “How dare the drop down not be just Elias Lindholm” which fundamentally shows a lack of understanding re: a team but maybe they were onto something.
In second place with 11 votes was Jacob Markström, which as we’ve previously discussed is absolutely true as long as it’s not a headshot. Rounding out the top three is Matthew Tkachuk (eight votes), which feels personally a little high for him but who am I to argue. Personally, I feel as though Oliver Kylington (seven votes) should have been a little higher, but it’s splitting hairs at that point.
Also, three of the top four are Swedes. Has anyone done any research into if Swedes are generally hot people?
Noah Hanifin and Mikael Backlund were the only other Flames with most than five votes (six apiece) so really, this is just Lindholm’s world and we are living in it. Unless you count future Flame Jack Eichel, who cracks five with the number of votes from the drop-down menu and the write-in votes.
Speaking of which…..the write-in votes had a lot to offer. Lots of votes for Harvey the Hound, which we assume has to be for Harvey himself and not anyone who has donned the Hound. Scorchie Ramz and I both know people who have been Harvey, and it’s better when they’re in the suit to say the least. Anyway, thank you to everyone who wrote in Harvey, Scorchstack appreciates the constant support it gets from the furry community and will make sure to include Harvey on the proper list next year.
Darryl Sutter also got a fair bit of love, which I have to imagine was inspired by the OT2 where we asked if Sutter was hot. We said no, but maybe we need to re-examine that. (ed. note: we do not)
Thank you to Nate who voted for Marcus Sorenson.
And finally, to whoever wrote in Barb - is that the name of the woman who sits behind the bench every home game? I am looking for more information about Barb, be it either the scowling lady or whoever the write-in vote was intended for. Please reach out to @thescorchstack with all your Barb facts.
What to do with Nikita Zadorov
The least you can say is that thank goodness it's a one-year contract
by Konnie (@konnie49)
With the Flames shocking everyone (except the Scorchstack of course) with their amazing start to the season, in which they not only are winning but are looking dominant while doing so, thanks to a four-game win streak during their first road trip of the year. One important change that happened before the Flames started their trip was to swap everyone’s favourite defenceman Nikita Zadorov with everyone’s actually favourite defenceman Oliver Kylington.
That proved to be the correct move, as Kylington has continued his play from the preseason, looking like an extremely solid top 4 option with Chris Tanev. For the two games that Zadorov played, he was flat-out horrid. With no real reason to play Zadorov and the fact that they can’t possibly sit a $3.75 million player on the sidelines all season, what the hell are they going to do with him?
Well, dear readers, I may have a few suggestions.
Number 1: Just don’t play him
Yes, it’s an absolute waste of resources and cap space to have such an expensive player to be in the press box for the remainder of the season, but it is still a better alternative than to actually have the player be on the ice. According to Natural Stat Trick, in his two games this season, he has a CF% of 46.30, an expected goals percentage of 37%, and is last in both of those categories relative to the rest of the team. He is just not good enough and to have that kind of an anchor with your best right-handed defence option in Chris Tanev, the team would essentially be dragging down the entire 2nd pairing. Especially since the Kylington-Tanev pairing is the exact opposite and has been extremely reliable for the team these past four games on the road.
Playing Zadorov down the lineup also does not help anyone, as then you would be looking at taking out Välimäki just so you can have a Zadorov-Tanev pairing. No one on planet Earth deserves to be subjected to such cruel torture.
It will hurt the owners’ pockets, but based on results we have seen so far, Zadorov should stay out of the lineup for the foreseeable future. Also, we don’t have to care about the pockets of billionaires.
Number 2: Just don’t play him
They are winning with Kylington in the lineup and he looks really good, why would you ever take out such a handsome man playing the best hockey we have seen him play?
Number 3: Just don’t play him
Seriously. Don’t.
Number 4: Don’t play him but instead bring him out during intermission and have him wrestle a Grizzly Bear at Centre Ice
It’s a national pastime in Russia and he is already getting paid super well. Why not? It will help sell more tickets!
Number 5: Just don’t play him
PLEAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSEEEEEEE.
Up Next Week
The Flames may win some more games? Tune in to find out.
Ramz attempts to fight the eight people who deemed Matthew Tkachuk as the hottest Flame (??????).
Overtime 2 gets national recognition and wins seven awards, including a Twitter Spaces Award (it’s real, don’t look it up though).
the fact that mickis isn't first on this list is criminal. have you looked at those eyes?