The Big Monday Thing - How Much Longer?
I might just start using this space to talk about the Seattle Mariners
Your Calgary Flames love to lose a lot of games in a row. A three-game losing streak here, sprinkle a four-game skid over there, just keep taking Ls. Consistently. At this point, it’s what’s expected. We’re used to it. Sitting down to watch your favourite team lose two or three times a week is no fun, but we’ve all developed a callous “You are no longer able to hurt us” attitude and we’re basically well beyond having any expectations for this team (or anything else) anymore. We see through everything
So when we see outsiders try to beat narratives like this into our rapidly dying horse:
Fine. Tweet them out. You shan’t be fooling us with such hollow oratory.
Yeah, we know Darryl hasn’t been the magic bullet that fans and ownership were likely hoping he would be, but at a certain point, we need to acknowledge that this team just isn’t very good, no matter who is barely wearing a mask behind the bench.
We’re all a little bewildered by some lineup decisions being made by Coach Sutter - personally, I think it’s great that the future cornerstone defenseman Juuso Valimaki is just apparently never going to play a game again, and scratching Dillon Dube in favour of some bottom of the barrel depth veterans that we’ll never see past this season NEVER gets old - but at the end of the day, he’s a pretty good coach, and you can only create so much with the tools you’re given. The simple, honest truth of the 2021 Calgary Flames is that they just aren’t a very good team, and not even God or Miikka Kiprusoff could save them (okay, Kipper probably could, if only we knew how and where to find him).
Darryl has not been perfect, and indeed he has a lot of flaws as a coach, but he’s also a student of the game, and if you stick to his systems, eventually you probably get rewarded for doing so. Unfortunately, it’s a little too late in the game, and Brett Ritchie as a top-six forward is never going to move the needle for you. So it’s time for Brad Treliving to start selling. It’s going to hurt, but at this point, it’s all that’s left to do.
The Week of: March 29th - April 4th
Results From Past Week: The best result for the Flames this week was a game that was canceled minutes before puck drop. That game was axed for truly horrendous reasons, and it was the only L the team didn’t take this week. The offseason is coming, friends!
Flames Overall Record: 16-20-3, 35 pts
Standings: Back down to 6th place in the North Division. The Vancouver Canucks haven’t played a game since March 24th, and have passed the Flames in the standings during that time. The offseason is coming, friends.
Soundtrack: Dark Paradise - Lana Del Rey
This song is on here this week solely because one of the lyrics in the song is “I wish I was dead”, which could not be more relatable to basically every Flames fan who has paid attention to the 2021 campaign.
What We Liked:
We here at The Scorchstack Network (or TSN) are avowed Fans Of Salim Nadim Valji, but man, asking this question to David Rittich is fucking harsh, and we’re happy Big Save Dave handled it like the king he is.
That’s what we like this week: David Rittich.
It’s extremely likely we witnessed him play his final game in a Flames jersey this past week and that’s a bummer because, for such an unheralded guy, he sure won his way into the collective hearts of Flames fans over the years. I don’t think anyone ever expected him to be more than an AHL goalie after the team signed him as a free agent in 2016, but he sure treated us to some legitimate NHL goaltending ever since wresting the net away from the goblin Mike Smith. He’s an all-star, and he’s been ours. I truly believe he should be way up the list on most beloved Flames of all time. Rittich is probably off to some fresher pastures after this season, but man, we wish him the best. I hope he wins a Stanley Cup and rubs it in our face. We all deserve that.
What We Would Prefer Not To See:
Given everything that’s gone down in Vancouver over the past week and change, I have no idea why we’re even still allowing the NHL to play hockey right now. I know it’s a logistical nightmare trying to sort all of this out, but let’s have a little compassion here. There are stronger, newer, scarier strains of COVID-19 overstaying their welcome, and one of them found its way into the NHL.
A little over a year ago, Rudy Gobert was the one player in the NBA diagnosed with coronavirus, and it shut down the entire sporting world for months on end. The situation in Vancouver right now is so much worse than that, and the discourse is centered around using points percentage to determine playoff seeding. That is so fucked up. The health of players and their families are on the line here, the playoffs are so not important right now.
I know capitalism remains undefeated, but we have a simple solution here, and it’s a real bummer no one intends on exploring it. This isn’t unique to hockey. In Canada, COVID-19 is still so prevalent it might as well be covered under CANCON laws, and families are all at risk. Most of us are still weeks and months away from even sniffing a vaccine, so now more than ever we need to lock this shit down and isolate until we can make this thing go away once and for all.
It’s pretty cool that we know everyone is hellbent on making sure that doesn’t happen.
Enemy of the Week:
Michael Stone scored a goal. Joakim Nordstrom scored a goal. We’re going to have to endure these blights on entertaining hockey for an eternity now. I’m not sure what celestial body the Flames offended, but we’re going to be paying for it for quite some time. Fuck whoever is responsible for this.
What Happens Next/We Were Right:
Last week’s prediction:
The trade deadline is April 12th, and with the season set to end on May 10th, I think teams are going to want more than a month for their playoff rentals to acclimatize to their new surroundings, so I feel like if any player swaps are going to go down, league-wide and for the Flames specifically, it’ll be this week.
Hmmmm….whoops.
This week is going to be interesting because the Flames are scheduled to play the Leafs one more time before embarking on back-to-back contests against the Canucks, but if either of those matches with Vancouver goes ahead, it’ll be because of some extremely irresponsible decision making.
So it seems likely that the Flames will only play one game this week, one last time against the Toronto Maple Leafs. They will lose. It will be insufferable.
First Career Hit and RBI for Taylor Trammell of The Week:
Look, the Flames are toast. Trade deadline and the draft are pretty much all we have left to look forward to as fans this season, so you’ll forgive me if I spent more time paying attention to my favourite non-Montreal Expos baseball team, the Seattle Mariners, during Opening Week. Taylor Trammell is a first-year player on this team, taking starting reps while reigning Rookie of the Year Kyle Lewis is on the injured list, and you know what? The kid is a lot of fun. Here is his first career hit and RBI in the third game of the season, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
Go Mariners.
Unrelated Fact:
According to studies, some dolphins refer to each other by name, using unique whistles to identify each other.
All of the dolphins coming out of the Northwest Pacific Ocean are named Jayden and Brayden. Do you get it? Do you get the joke? Because WHL players are all named like that? Do you get it? Please clap.
See You Next Week:
Because the Flames suck, we here at the Scorchstack are already eyeing content to produce during the offseason.
One of the things we’re working on is basically just us ripping off an idea from the Trust the Process podcast in Vancouver, and creating a bracket for the most “Calgary Flames moments” in their history.
This doesn’t mean big-ticket franchise events like “when they won the Cup”, but more moments that are frozen in time which wouldn’t stick out to you unless you have been following this team on purpose (although our preliminary list DOES include some of the biggest moments in team history, but hey man, whatever). Good or bad, we’re going to put them to the test and determine a champion.
If you have any memories of this team that you feel the vast majority of the fanbase remembers with some clarity, feel free to send them to either our twitter account, or my own twitter (maybe we’ll figure out something else for non-twitter users, but also just as likely: we won’t).
Here’s what the list we’re throwing around right now looks like:
We’re not sure what the final number is going to be, but we’ll take as many suggestions as we can, and if we need to eliminate some options, we will. Again, this isn’t necessarily about the most highlighted moments in Flames history, nor are we necessarily looking for the BEST moments for the team, just things that have resonated especially well over the years. If you refer to the list, you get a good sense of what we’re searching for. Some things we are just eliminating outright: Theo Fleury moments, on account of his status as a major shithead that bums us out, or the Red Mile, as looking back a lot of that whole thing is really gross!
But we’re looking to crowdsource some more ideas, just so we don’t miss anything obvious, and then we’ll vote on these over the offseason and crown a winner, and goodness, won’t you feel great about that?
Assuming you ever do feel great about anything ever again.