The Big Monday Thing - Nothing Bad Can Ever Hurt Us Again
Hey, if we're bringing back old friends, I hear Jarome is doing coaching now too
I promise to approach this week’s Big Monday Thing with a measured and thoughtful cadence, one that doesn’t cater to recency bias, and I assure you that….nope. NOPE. The Flames are going to win the Stanley Cup. Call me Jay Feaster because this is a guarantee.
The Week of: March 7th-14th
Results From Past Week: HEYYYYY
What a difference a week and a potentially massive upgrade in coaching can make. Your Calgary Flames collected five of six points over the past seven (eh…eight) days, celebrated well earned, dominant back-to-back wins over Montreal, and are very possibly never going to lose another game ever again.
Flames Overall Record: 13-12-3, 29 pts
Standings: 5th in the North Division, but absolutely do not look now because on the strength of those wins over the Habs (who themselves seem to be going through the motions in the larval stage of their own Geoff Ward scenario. Hey Dominique Ducharme, here’s a free lesson: try playing some music during practice), 4th place is in spitting distance. 3rd place? No longer just a fantasy. 5th place just hits different right now. The Flames have got them right where they want them.
Soundtrack: Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O’Connor
You have to believe me, this is me taking these developments with a grain of salt.
What We Liked:
The entire thread by Jack Han here is very good, but this tweet in particular — which breaks down the tweaks the new-look Flames have made to their breakout — is the main thing that has me so tickled since The Stuff That Happened Last Week.
There were a lot of tactical issues under Geoff Ward (tibs laid out a pretty good reason as to why he never really seemed to have a plan on attack), but chief amongst them was an absolutely useless breakout scheme. There has been a lot of ink spilled on that subject (Here is a particularly good read on their dismal structure), but the long and short of it is that the Flames would either:
Give the puck to Johnny Gaudreau, forcing an otherwise dynamic puckhandler to skate directly into the defensive pressure without any decent options for support, or;
They would bypass him completely, throwing exit passes up to forwards…directly into the defensive pressure without any decent options for support.
The Flames are teeming with talented forwards but, short of cloning a 23-year-old Mario Lemieux, no player is skilled enough to succeed this way when the other team knows where you’re going even before you do.
Darryl Sutter’s schemes do not work this way. While I don’t love the “breakaway threat” set up all that much (it’s just a little too reminiscent of Bob Hartley’s entire “just do stretch passes” system), the premise is beautiful in its simplicity: the players transitioning over to offense are not all playing north-south hockey in uniform, allowing for the puck carrier to be confident with the puck knowing there is support. It is far more proactive, and man, what a concept that is. We’re talking angles, friends. It’s just math. Math from a farmer. Sutter implemented very similar strategies to this in Los Angeles, and we all know what happened there.
The massive caveat here of course is that this is an incredibly small sample size, and given that this is the best league in the world, teams will adjust to Calgary’s attack. But we never witnessed anything like this at all under Geoff Ward, and the fundamentals at play here never go out of style. Darryl Sutter has his flaws, but he is an excellent coach overall, one who is a relentless student of the game. Teams will adapt to the Flames, and the Flames will adapt to those teams. These are exciting times.
What We Would Prefer Not To See: If you follow me on twitter (I wouldn’t, but do what you gotta do), you would have (maybe) put up with an entire night last week of me buying all the way in on Brett Ritchie’s status as a full-time Calgary Flame. I thought he meshed very well with a returning Derek Ryan, and played a very effective 4th line game. Functional 4th line, not Zac Rinaldo 4th line.
Maybe someone was listening and took my comments out of context, because after that game, we’ve seen him become a fixture on a unit next to Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan, and oh boy, is that not what I was talking about at all.
Obviously, nobody believes Ritchie is a fit on that line. The gradual cooling off we’ve seen from the 23-13 pairing is well documented, and if Sam Bennett wasn’t going to be the magic bullet, we won’t leave Ritchie in that spot and call it problem solved. This is not about Ritchie himself, as much as it is clear that there’s no one else to pencil into that role that checks off the right boxes, not without removing a player from an already high leverage situation.
Pretty much every RW on the team has had an audition with The Faces Of The Franchise to varying, but ultimately underwhelming success. You can probably drop Andrew Mangiapane or Dillon Dube next to them right now and make something happen once they get some consistent reps in, but those two particular players have their own stews cooking right now so, in the interim, it’s more spare parts for a line that can only really be used effectively under the veil of sheltered minutes right now.
On this week’s main issue, we’ll have a piece on One Weird Trick the Flames could try that, while I hesitate to claim fully cures what ails that line right now, is potentially the most prudent option they can try while still retaining balance across the rest of the forward corps. But ultimately, this team is going to need to address an apparent lack of skill on the right side (can you believe I’m the first one to ever bring this up over the past few years???) and unfortunately, they might need to get creative in ways that aren’t feasible in the era we’re living in right now.
We’re all excited about the changes Darryl Sutter is bringing to his new old team, and they should make them better overall. But this league - despite every narrative we have been bombarded with since the Edmonton Oilers started issuing press passes - is built on speed and skill, and it always will be. You just need to have it.
Enemy of the Week: Fuck it, it’s Connor McDavid. This guy might be a top 50-100 player in the NHL, and it seems like he elevates himself into the Top 20 when he plays the Flames.
They should do something about that.
(I wrote this last week, but the Flames only have 6 opponents all year, and yowie wowie if it isn’t still applicable this time around. It’s a bummer, but at least it saves me some work, and isn’t that what matters most anyway?)
What Happens Next/We Were Right:
Last week’s prediction:
I guess I’ll just go ahead and predict that the Flames sweep a suddenly desperate Montreal team in this week’s back-to-back matchup. We deserve this.
We DID deserve it, didn’t we? Kick rocks, Montreal. Corey Perry looks like he uses a cooked ham as a pillow.
Sorry if this is starting to sound terse, but the Flames play ONLY the Leafs and Oilers this week, and are we not sick of this shit yet? God, I would kill to see a game against the Wild or the Coyotes right now, and just how sick is that?
I mean, look at this absolute whopper of a lie from Sportsnet, surely an entity that has no financial stake in the Canadian NHL franchises in any way:
I beg your unbelievable pardon? I, for one, cannot wait to go back to normal. We are living in hell. I can’t be the only one who thinks so.
With this distinctly Canadian brand of misery firmly in mind, my prediction for this week is The Discourse surrounding a continued North Division will just shatter any remaining hope of my hairline remaining where it’s supposed to on my head. Check it out, I’m already right.
Get A Load Of This Guy Of The Week:
This week I jumped on the Timmy Sestak bandwagon faster than I’ve ever done anything in my entire life. Look at this guy! Look at him!
I actually dug up Sestak’s Elite Prospects page, and despite his entire aura screaming that he’s perpetually recovering from exactly one too many Jagerbombs, he still managed to sport a sparkling .936 sv% over three seasons at Wesleyan, collecting Division III All-Conference, All-American, and Player of the Year Honours during that time.
If Barry Brust didn’t exist, Tim Sestak would be my hero.
Unrelated Fact:
Did you guys see the thing that happened at the Grammys this weekend? Man, I cannot BELIEVE the thing that happened at the Grammys this weekend. I don’t need to go into detail, obviously, because when I say the thing that happened at the Grammys this weekend, we all know what I mean, because we all definitely watched The Grammys, so we saw the thing that happened at the Grammys this weekend. Wild. You wouldn’t catch me doing anything like that.
See You Next Week:
Bad news! I’m watching The Sopranos for the first time, and I love it! Why is that bad?I’m glad you asked.
The reason why this is troubling (for you, this is all bad news for you) is because I am FOR SURE going to start talking like the way everyone does on the show (particularly Carmella Soprano), and it’s going to seep into the work you see from me here on the Scorchstack. I’m not even trying to do it, I just know it’s inevitable. All of this would be fine if I were screenwriter David Chase bringing you his thoughts every week on the only Calgary Flames substack on the internet, but it turns out, and this surprised me too, that I am not David Chase.
Sorry!