The Big Monday Thing - The Flames Are Good
No one wants to say it, not even me. But I'm still gonna!
Andrew Mangiapane only has two assists this season. I think we can all agree that is simply not good enough.
The Week of: November 15th-21st
Results From Past Week: Very funny that the Flames dropped a couple of games in the extra frame over the past handful of days, prompting lots of Negative Norbits across the Iginlasphere to spin the results and proclaim the team to be Secretly Bad. They did lose one game in overtime this week, against the Philadelphia Flyers, but also surrendered a paltry two goals in their remaining three contests, shutting out the Sabres and Bruins, and forever ruining the new stadium smell of UBS Arena by forcing the Islanders to tap out in its Grand Opening. The team has picked up 11 out of 12 points in its last six games, which to me, I don’t know, seems good.
Flames Overall Record: 11-3-5, 27 pts
Standings: 1st place in the Pacific Division, 1st place in the Western Conference. Lots of hockey still yet to be played, of course, but we’re certainly out of the “caveat that it’s still early” realm.
Soundtrack: Alaska - Pinegrove
I have no comment on this song, other than to say it was released on the same day the Flames last lost a game in regulation. This is all just to put this in perspective. I mean, who talks about fucking Pinegrove anymore?
What We Liked:
Choose your own adventure here. Pick the first paragraph if you want to read about Andrew Mangiapane’s torrid goal-scoring pace, or the second stanza if goalies never letting a puck past them is more your speed.
While the official Scorchstack stance is to continue gatekeeping Andrew Mangiapane - for a number of reasons, be they financial or annoying Leafs fans - it’s impossible not to be impressed by the Bread Boy’s penchant for flipping the switch on the goal light. Now tied for second in the league with 15 goals - including fucking 14 ON THE ROAD - Mangiapane is the trigger man in the top six that Sean Monahan is/was supposed to be. He’s shooting at 31.3% on the season, which is 23 points higher than his career average, but I’m just going to say it’s sustainable, because he’s fun as hell and it’s my feature, and I can do what I want.
What I can’t do, and what it seems like anyone else on the planet is unable to do right now, is score on a Flames goalie. Jacob Markström and Dan Vladař both picked up another shutout each since the last time we checked in, and collectively have seven in 19 games. It seems to me like you give your team a fairly high chance of winning when you never allow a goal, but I’m not particularly strong at math, so someone will have to run those numbers for me. The tandem has a combined save percentage of .943, and obviously, that’s sure to even out over the remainder of this season, but does it have to? This team is running on some pretty hot streaks on both sides of the puck right now, but at some point, even if the numbers start to dip, it’s not impossible to think the Flames could just ride the lightning this whole season because they have good players who are playing to the top of their ability. For now, that’s what’s happening with the goaltenders. Markström looks every bit the $36 million keeper they were hoping to acquire in free agency two years ago, and Vladař was targeted by the team via trade during a free agency period awash with available backups, and that’s starting to look like a tidy piece of business. Let the good times roll.
What We Would Prefer Not To See:
Hopefully, this is something we’ve seen the end of based on how they changed it up against the Bruins yesterday evening, but the pairing of Nikita Zadorov and Erik Gudbranson absolutely has to go.
If you watched the game against the Islanders, it was clear that any high-danger chance came when that duo was on the ice, and I have to believe that’s the reason why we saw Zadorov in the press box in Boston. They just simply cannot do their jobs at an NHL level, and certainly not together. Darryl Sutter has had surprisingly few blind spots when it comes to player usage this season, but this has been one of them.
We saw Juuso Välimäki put on a strong performance on Sunday, his first game in a month, so hopefully, he gets a bit more leash. If the plan with Juuso is similar to the approach we’ve all endured in finally allowing Oliver Kylington a chance to be successful, this could be a long and frustrating process, but I just can’t with these two anymore. Hopefully, the team has decided to pour a little gas on this and expedite the process.
Enemy of the Week:
This week’s enemy is the brick wall from the Nintendo 64 classic Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey.
Not only is this an absurdly obvious violation of the rules of the game, but I’m also certain it’s the only reason why Flames winger Dillon Dube has gone 12 games in a row without scoring a goal. The people want to see Dillon’s mean-mugging face, and this dastardly wall, one that I’m still not totally clear on how it was erected in the net without anyone noticing, is the main culprit preventing us from seeing it.
We’ll see you in hell, brick wall.
What Happens Next:
A little bit of a break for our heroes in red! They return to the friendly confines of the Saddledome to play [redacted], before enjoying a well-earned three days away from the rink to rest up, do some Christmas shopping, and enjoy that balmy November heat Calgary is known for.
Then they play the Jets. I guess that’s fun too.
Kokanee Beer Rabbit Hole of The Week:
Dion Phaneuf officially hung up the blades on Tuesday, which happened to be the anniversary of the day the team acquired Scorchstack hero and greatest goalie in the history of hockey (non-Dustin Wolf category) Miikka Kiprusoff, which naturally gives us even the mildest of reasons to post everyone’s favourite picture of, we think, the old Cowboys, when our good boys were enjoying a quiet moment away from the rink:
One day we’ll do a much deeper dive on this photo, which frankly, it deserves, but this time around, this picture got me down a bit of a rabbit hole. That beer in the frame with the torn-off label, I’m pretty sure that’s a Kokanee. If you’re like me, a millennial who grew up dumb and unrefined in Western Canada, Kokanee played a big role in your life at one time, but I’ll bet you haven’t seen one in forever. That was certainly the case for me. I can’t even think of the last time a can with the hidden Sasquatch and the majestic mountain range caught my eye in a store, and these used to be freaking EVERYWHERE. It’s the beer out here!
I did some digging, and while they do still exist, they don’t really seem to want people to know about it, at least based on their social media presence. They haven’t posted anything on Instagram since January 2020, and if you check out their Twitter, this is what you see:
I tried to follow them and:
It’s not a new development to visit a website for a brewery and be met with an age verification checker before proceeding on in, but I’ve never seen it on a Twitter page before. I even checked a bunch of other random breweries to see if they made me go through the same labour, and none of them did.
I never bothered to delve into this any further, but I’m still able to surmise that something bad happened here, and my guess is it involves the resurfacing of some problematic old tweets from the company spokesperson, The Sasquatch.
Unrelated Fact:
Some famous guy got shot in Dallas once years ago on this day, I don’t know, I didn’t really look into it, but it sounded like it was kind of a big deal. Maybe it was Ed Belfour or something.
See You Next Week:
Kelly Hrudey got COVID-19! That’s not funny, and we wish him well because with him down and out, we have no idea who is currently on duty. Someone has got to be on duty. Please, we are lost at sea.