The Big Monday Thing - Honourary Scorchie For Life Enters The Hall Of Fame
Jarome is Scorchstack, deal with it
You know, if I was a Boston news reporter covering a story about the bad winter weather, and I was at a gas station at night getting man-on-the-street style coverage, and then the snow disappeared, and a single, awesome ray of sunshine lit up everything I could see, both in my direct eye line and everything ‘oer the horizon, and woodland creatures emerged from their snowy winter shelters, blinking frantically upon realizing a new opportunity to frolic jauntily in a pristine springtime born anew, I’d be like “well it appears as if Jarome Iginla has graced us with his presence”, but I don’t know, that’s just me.
The Week of: November 8th-14th
Results From Past Week: It brings me no joy in reporting this, but the Flames dropped back-to-back decisions against a couple of legitimately bad teams this week. The Flaming C fell prey to an all-time goaltending performance from something called an Adin Hill, found themselves in a “one of those game” scenarios against the Canadiens, all before Dan Vladař put the world on his back and inspired many of us against the Ontario teams, earning three out of four points in a truly unfair overtime loss to the Leafs and an easy victory over a bunch of NPCs wearing Ottawa Senators jerseys.
Are the Flames good? Are they bad? We have no way of knowing. They’re pretty fun to watch though.
Flames Overall Record: 8-3-4, 20 pts
Standings: 3rd place in the Pacific Division, 4th in the Western Conference, although they are 2nd in the Pacific based on points percentage. If the playoffs started today and all was equalized, the Flames would enjoy home-ice advantage in a first-round series against the Anaheim Ducks. Let’s just end the regular season and go with that.
Soundtrack: Wolf Piss - Aesop Rock and Blockhead
Aesop Rock is one of my all-time favourite artists, and I don’t think he’s ever been on the Big Monday Thing before. Given that he released a new album this past week, it turned out conditions were perfect to correct that.
What We Liked:
Let’s talk about Dan Vladař for a second.
We won’t forget for even one second what we have in Jacob Markström, who has performed well beyond the lofty expectations we had for him thus far and is going to be one of the most significant factors in how the 2021-22 campaign for the Calgary Flames shakes out. But for a fairly unknown entity in Dan Vladař, early returns are pretty dang encouraging.
We talked about this earlier this week on the world-famous Overtime 2 (only on The Scorchstack Network, or TSN), but Markström is going to be most effective this year if he remains relatively well-rested and healthy, which is going to mean careful management of his workload over the course of the season. Gone are the days where your backup goalie could be comically subpar, a manageable bungling of appearances between the pipes that you were only requested to suffer through a meager 10-15 times a year. Your number two has to be a capable puck stopper, and so far we’re seeing Vladař might be exactly that.
Unless you’re a scout or in an inner circle of an NHL management team and you’re reading this (we know you are, by the way), you are lying if you knew who Dan Vladař was before this season. The Flames appeared to be pretty high on him, going out of their way to trade an asset to the Boston Bruins to acquire him whilst neck-deep in free agency, and early on, it’s easy to see why. I could gush at length about his efficiency for a man of his larger stature, but tall people don’t need to be fed any more praise for being tall, so in short (yep), Vladař kinda kicks ass. Darryl Sutter certainly seems to have confidence in him, and he’s ended up making starts in what you wouldn’t normally consider “backup goalie” games. For his part, Vladař is rewarding the team for that trust, putting in four strong performances this year, with a bunch more sure to come. Markström is still the King, but Vladař is looking like he might be a pretty key figure to the Flames success this year as well, and that has to make discerning fans like you and I absolutely beam.
Of course, we need to recognize that Dustin Wolf is killing it in Stockton this year, and it’s only a matter of time until he puts both members of the current NHL squad platoon out of work, but until then, we here at the Scorchstack are unabashed Vladařheads.
What We Would Prefer Not To See:
Well, we finally had to enDuehr Walker this week. Just a little play on words there.
It really isn’t that big of a deal that Walker Duehr made his NHL debut yesterday against the Sens. He’s on the big club right now while the team tends to some injuries in its depth ranks, and any real prospect is better off getting steady ice time in the AHL instead of collecting dust in the press box. But Walker Duehr is a distressing figure. You get a little weary when a player that offers nothing tangible to a team starts getting rewarded for some kind of fabricated meritocracy. You start seeing players like this become fan favourites, mostly because their relative lack of big-league talent makes them far more empathetic to a fanbase than the stars of this league, who are capable of doing things normie dweebs like you or I could ever dream up on our own.
This is a bad thing.
We’ve seen this in past versions of this team. A Walker Duehr is a Ryan Lomberg or Garnet Hathaway dressed up with a new name and an overwhelmingly average collegiate career. These players come across as hard-working, mostly because they’re not up to speed the same way some more polished hockey thoroughbreds in the game are, and they have to try that much harder to even keep up. It’s not the end of the world - talent rises to the top at the end of the day - but in the meantime, it’s just really hard to watch.
In related news, boy it would be nice to see Juuso Välimäki get even one more look in the lineup over Nikita Zadorov, who I’m about ready to name a cruise ship after.
Enemy of the Week:
Seriously, what the FUCK is Adin Hill???
What Happens Next:
The back half of the season-long seven-game road trip concludes this week, with four games in the Northeastern United States, including one contest in which the Flames can inflict some catharsis-based revenge on the Buffalo Sabres for wasting everyone’s precious fucking time. I think we can all agree that anything short of a 9-0 drubbing of Terry Pegula’s team is simply unacceptable. Games against the Islanders, Bruins, and Flyers are on the schedule as well, if you’re into that kind of thing, you sickos.
Getting to See Jarome Iginla Again of The Week:
Sometimes it’s hard to think of something interesting to put in this section that isn’t related to the slew of games this team plays from week to week. Other times, Jarome Iginla becomes enshrined for all time among the upper echelon of hockey’s elite, where the blade-footed gods of the frozen pond whisper his name among their own with a dignified respect and reverence, and all of this stuff writes itself.
I think if you’re an NHL player whose career was storied enough to earn induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, that probably feels really, really cool, but for me, I don’t care about any of this stuff. The induction process, the committees, the pomp and circumstance all seem really uninteresting to me, but hey, I’m not going to take it away from anyone.
What is and will always be gripping to me, however, is Jarome Arthur-Leigh Adekunle Tig Junior Elvis Iginla, and if getting called to the Hall is an excuse for the TV to make me gaze into his beautiful, forehead creased dream of a face even one more time, it is so so so worth it.
We were undeservedly blessed with a barrage of Iggy this past week. Interviews, ceremonial puck drops, highlight videos, you name it, Jarome was everywhere, and I will never, ever get enough of it. Whenever we go through these seemingly always well-done tributes to the greatest Calgary Flame of all time, it just makes me realize how much I miss him. We got to bear witness to arguably the greatest player of his generation putting on the same jersey we all did as fans, and while I can’t decide if we ever took that for granted, I don’t think we’ll ever realize how monumentally cool that is. He was the greatest, and he was one of ours.
Damn.
U̶n̶r̶e̶l̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶F̶a̶c̶t̶:̶ Ben Simmons News Update:
A guy in Philadelphia dialed in to a local sports radio call-in show to complain about Ben Simmons, endured someone driving into his car right as the call was connected, and continued to complain about Simmons instead of getting the license plate of the motorist who hit him.
I don’t like that he’s saying Simmons is lying about his mental health, but everything about this is peak Philly sports fan, which is just about my favourite genre of people. They have not evolved as a species since probably 1995, which sounds bad, but I think it’s great.
Outstanding.
See You Next Week:
Scorchies have been everywhere of late. Mike was on Game Over with our friend Andrew Berkshire, while Nathan and Ramz took over the airwaves on Locked On Canadiens. Where are we going to be next, freaking CNN???
It probably won’t be CNN.