The Big Monday Thing - It's A Nice Day To Break A Record
Columbus is going to have to buy a new jacket after what the Flames did to their blue one
I started writing this while the Canadian men’s national soccer team came that much closer to punching their ticket to Qatar this fall, so excuse me if this feels a little disjointed (uh, more so) this week. I’ve been spending my time trying to find some Milan Borjan sweatpants, but they’re proving to be harder to find than a PS5.
I’m making that up. You can buy grey sweatpants literally anywhere.
The Week of: January 24th-30th
Results From Past Week: Your Calgary Flames played their first full weekly slate of games in what feels like, I don’t know, six or seven years, notching three wins in four tries, and ended the lives of the Columbus Blue Jackets in the process. The team earned (earned?) a split with the St. Louis Blues, with both teams exchanging lopsided victories, before ending the week winning the most boring match in recorded history against a much, much worse team from Vancouver. Oh, and the Flames set a franchise record for shots in a game and Jacob Markström recorded two more shutouts. Kind of a tame week.
Flames Overall Record: 21-13-6, 48 pts
Standings: 4th place in the Pacific Division, 8th in the Western Conference. Moved up one spot in both categories. All these makeup games in February are going to make for Jägerbombs of chaos. I love it.
Soundtrack: The Ledge - The Replacements
This song has been stuck in my head for what feels like the entire week, and I have no idea why, because I don’t recall having heard it recently. Putting it here just to give the track a whirl through my headphones. The Replacements are one of the best bands in the entire world, so this is just fine.
What We Liked:
Here’s something they don’t tell you in the mainstream media: to score goals in hockey, you need to take shots. Shots are good. Shots are the oxygen of a hockey game.
The Calgary Flames sure seem to love breathing oxygen. They set a team record with 62 pucks on goal against the Blue Jackets, and there’s really not much more you’d love to see than that. If you’re putting the 4th most all-time shots on net in one game - two days removed from rocketing another 48 against a pretty good Blues team - you’re doing a lot of things right. This has been a trend all season, and certainly, I’ve talked about it a lot in this space, but hey, if it ain’t broke.
Obviously, when you’re peppering the net with that much rubber, not all the shots you’re putting on the net are going to be high quality, but considering the Flames scored 15 goals in four games, the chances are clearly coming. We’re essentially at the halfway part of the season, and this has been a trend all year, so I don’t think this is going away anytime soon. I’m here for it.
What We Would Prefer Not To See:
This is Darryl Sutter’s 20th season as an NHL head coach (congratulations big man!), running a bench now for four separate franchises over that time (including, as we all know, two stints with the Flames). Over the years, he’s been blessed with some all-world goaltenders with a metric ton of his own faith in, and it’s a formula that has paid off for him. He took over in Chicago during that sweet spot before Ed Belfour started getting blasted and trying to pay cops a billion dollars not to arrest him, an era where he’d be maybe the best goalie in the world if it didn’t happen to be when literal Dominik Hašek was also kicking around. In San Jose, he was blessed with an in-his-prime Evgeni Nabokov — maybe one of the most underrated goaltenders of all time — and he rode the wave of some Jonathan Quick hot streaks to two Stanley Cup victories.
And of course, in Calgary, he had some scrub named Miikka. Likes to fish, I’m told.
The common trend with Sutter and all his netminders is that he turns them into workhorses. Belfour and Kiprusoff would routinely put in 70+ start seasons, and while Quick and Nabokov played a little less, they still flirted with that kind of workload as well. Sutter isn’t the only coach who ever relied on goalies this way, but he’s the only coach who still relies on goalies this way. It’s served him well in the past, but there are so many studies on the benefits of rest now, and we know it’s not prudent to throw a goalie into the fire as often as they used to in the past.
The problem is now he’s got Jacob Markström, and he knows it. I don’t think it behooves the team to have played him in all four games this week, and not in a back-to-back situation as he did against Columbus and St. Louis, especially since it came in the middle of four games in six days.
On the surface, the Flames big-money goalkeeper seems comfortable taking the bulk of the starts, but he very clearly ended up burning out last season, injuring himself on one of the wildest plays we’ve seen from a Flames goalie in some time, and was never quite the same coming back. He appears to be back to the elite goaltender we knew he was when Brad Treliving signed him to a six-year contract, which is great, but there has to have been a lesson learned here. The Flames went out acquired what feels like found money in Dan Vladař, who has given the team no reason to hesitate to give him starts whenever they need to rest Markström, so unless Vladař is secretly nursing an injury, I have no idea what we’re doing here.
The team did win three of four with Markström in net, so we can’t be too mad, but at some point, we need to keep an eye on the bigger picture here.
Enemy of the Week:
Things have been going pretty well of late, so I think I’m going to use this space to start a feud you likely didn’t see coming. This week’s enemy is, that’s right: dril.
We’re coming for you, dril.
(It would be pretty funny if there were people reading this that aren’t on twitter, but I’m willing to bet that there isn’t much of a Venn Diagram here)
What Comes Next:
After all that bullshit I was spewing about going back to a busy schedule, the Flames make me look like an idiot by only suiting up for two games this week. This would have been the part of the year where they would have been wrapping up and getting ready for an extended Olympic break, but there’s been this little matter of a global pandemic, so you know, now it’s going to all be the opposite.
The Flames head back out on the road AGAIN for a midweek back-to-back against Dallas and Arizona, and oh god please win the game against the Coyotes.
Theo Fleury Tweet of the Week:
Wow, congrats on your big week Theo. Putin called me too, but we just talked about the weather. He did invite me to come hunt unicorns, but I declined because that’s unethical and also because none of this is real.
Unrelated Fact:
The Royal Rumble sucked ass, but I watched the entire thing, so fuck me right?
See You Next Week:
I read a headline that said that over the span of his career, Johnny Knoxville has amassed over $8 million in hospital bills. I’m thankful the Flames aren’t playing on Thursday, so I’m free and clear to find out how much of that money went to treating him during the making of Jackass Forever.