The Big Monday Thing - One Last Ride
"the playoffs cannot begin until the regular season ends" - ancient proverb
Kind of a short one this week! It says here Sam Bennett got suspended for a game for boarding Blake Coleman, but I’m looking at the schedule and it seems like the Florida Panthers already wrapped up the regular season quite some time ago.
Gonna get to the bottom of this.
The Week of: May 10th-16th
Results From Past Week: Your Calgary Flames really solidified their playoff chances with two wins over the Vancouver Canucks, who have been nipping at their heels. Still more work to be done, but the playoffs - whenever those start, not totally sure - are within their grasp after those strong performances.
Flames Overall Record: 25-26-3, 53 pts
Standings: 5th place in the North Division. All the sites that show standings are displaying playoff trees with some game action already on there. Don’t know what that’s about. Some goof with the stat sites or something. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
Soundtrack: Swim Good - Frank Ocean
At its heart, Swim Good is a track about being strong and fighting towards something bigger. I can’t think of a better way to describe this last surge towards the postseason by the Flames.
What We Liked:
#NoDomingue2021 is still in play! This is what happens when you play over your head down the stretch, the games become more important and you need to rely on your starting goaltender more than ever. With everything on the line, I see no reason to turn away from Jacob Markstrom in the remaining two games, which of course means not seeing Louie Domingue ever stand in front of a net in a Flames uniform, which is what all of us really want.
What We Would Prefer Not To See:
RIP Sean Monahan. Jumped out of a plane but was shocked to learn that his parachute was actually a full size grand piano, and his backup chute was a baby grand piano.
Enemy of the Week:
Pretty obvious that the enemy this week is the Vancouver Canucks, the long time arch-rival, and the remaining barrier towards a postseason berth for Darryl Sutter’s crew. Given the back and forth nature of the game last night, it does seem like this would be a wonderful best of seven series. I wonder if Vancouver can also qualify for the playoffs. Time will tell.
What Happens Next/We Were Right:
Last week’s prediction:
So, with that in mind, no predictions this week. My psychic equity is spent. Let’s just see how this all plays out. There are two games against the Canucks this week. They could be meaningless before the puck even drops. Let’s take this ride together.
Not gonna lie, when I wrote this, it didn’t click in my head that the remaining four games against the Canucks would play out over two weeks. That seems like something a clairvoyant like myself would have picked up on. Weird.
Anyway my prediction for this week is that next week I will be preparing for a lengthy playoff run’s worth of Big Monday Things. Feeling pretty good about this one.
World Hockey Championships Anomaly of The Week:
I assume everyone who is reading this is familiar enough with the IIHF World Men’s Hockey Championships by now: running concurrently with the playoffs, it’s the international tournament that NHL players who are good, but not good enough to fight for the Stanley Cup play in so they don’t have to transition right into spending time with their families and loved ones (yuck!)
That’s why it was so odd this week to see that Flames forwards Andrew Mangiapane and Dillon Dube have been selected by Team Canada to represent their country in the tournament.
Now I know the Flames have NEAR insurmountable odds of earning a postseason berth at this point, but until every team has played 56 games, everything is still in play. For the Flames to appear to have quit on this thing by making players available for a separate tournament feels very defeatist to me. Just one more thing I need to get to the bottom of this week.
Unrelated Fact:
Very funny to see a bunch of presumably skilled hockey players try to hide their sighs and let a 68 year old man play out his hockey fantasy camp dreams while the whole country watches on, trying not to laugh out of fear of never being seen from ever again.
You would love to see a huge open ice hit here, but you know…Vladimir Putin.
See You Next Week:
Hey. Play Matthew Phillips. You donkeys.
See you next week.