The Calgary Flames continue their road trip later today against a 6-7-1 Boston Bruins squad that is still trying to define their place in the NHL.
Fresh off two straight shutouts, the Bruins proceeded to lay a goose egg on Tuesday against the Toronto Maple Leafs. The final score ended 4-0, and given Boston’s tendency to lose multiple games in a row, questions linger surrounding the once-deemed perennial contenders.
For the Flames, it’s an opportunity to string two wins together and potentially seal a winning points percentage on their three-game road trip.
On a more macro level, Calgary’s season has had an eerie symmetry to date.
Four straight wins followed by a win and a loss—then four straight losses followed by a win and a loss. If this strange pattern is to continue (which it will not because that’s ridiculous), expect the next three games to be wins.
Set up a three-game parlay and bet your life on it.
We’ll quickly do lineups before moving on to a few storylines to follow.
Calgary Flames Projected Lineup
Courtesy of Derek Wills.
@Fan960Wills
Zary-Kadri-Kuzmenko
Huberdeau-Sharangovich-Pospisil
Coleman-Backlund-Coronato
Lomberg-Rooney-Kirkland
Bahl-Andersson
Weegar-Miromanov
Barrie-Pachal
Wolf
Vladar
Boston Bruins Projected Lineup
Practice lines courtesy of Scott McLaughlin.
@smclaughlin9
Johnson-Zacha-Pastrnak
Marchand-Lindholm-Brazeau
Koepke-Coyle-Poitras
Beecher-Kastelic-Frederic
Zadorov-McAvoy
Lindholm-Carlo
Lohrei-Wotherspoon
Swayman
Korpisalo
Trolling
The Bruins fought against themselves more than the Leafs on Tuesday. Per BostonHockeyNow’s Andrew Fantucchio, the Bruins put themselves into seven shorthanded situations against Toronto, a season-high for them.
Will Nikita Zadorov take one or two, perhaps going a little hard against his former team? That certainly
sounds like something that would happen.
It’s certainly possible that undisciplined play is a talking point in the Flames dressing room prior to this one. Nazem Kadri leads the team in penalties drawn at seven. Andrei Kuzmenko has six. Ryan Lomberg and Martin Pospisil have five each. All four are in the top 100 in that category across the League.
Back on the Hunt
Anthony Mantha has been placed on IR, and 28-year-old Dryden Hunt has been recalled from the AHL Calgary Wranglers.
A lot of people will take exception to calling up a veteran who has had several opportunities to stick. Most would rather see Rory Kerins play his first NHL game. Adam Klapka could also slot into that right wing position. Walker Duehr has more points from a lower position in the lineup.
This has to be
make or break for Hunt. Ryan Huska and Craig Conroy aren't going to bury him or Duehr, but they likely won’t have much for slack. A couple games off the scoresheet, and that will be it.
Hunt is being plucked from the Wranglers first line. While he has a mere ten points in 12 games (19th in AHL scoring), his game is more about creating space. He’s done well for linemates Rory Kerins and Jakob Pelletier, who are 4th and 11th in League scoring.
Strange Combos
Let’s roll it back and look at the forward lineup again.
Zary-Kadri-Kuzmenko
Huberdeau-Sharangovich-Pospisil
Coleman-Backlund-Coronato
Lomberg-Rooney-Kirkland
What seems to be weird here is that Pospisil and Sharangovich usually shouldn’t be on a line together. They’re play-driving, puck-carrying forwards. The Flames don’t have much for high-end speed, in fact, that’s pretty much it.
Without them, we're looking at a team that
really struggles to take either blue line with speed. That was a huge problem in 2022-2023.
Backlund is fast when he has time to build up. Rooney was fast last season and is inexplicably just average this year. None of Zary, Kadri, or Kuzmenko are considered burners and put up below-average speed stats last season.
This is a topic we can dive into more later. NHL Edge is painful in terms of comparing players. You have to look each skater up on your own, record it onto a spreadsheet, and sometimes divide it by
minutes played to get a sense of who is fast on a team. Seriously, all the data they have is quantitive. They don’t even do rates per 60 minutes; something that would be the ultimate barometer of whether a player is useful in the neutral zone/leaving the defensive zone.
It’s a shame that the NHL collects all of this cool data and then makes it a process to navigate
if you can find the link to it nuzzled away well off of the front page. Skating is now essentially just a niche stat for beat reporters despite being the most important aspect of the game.
Sorry for the rant.
Game time is 5:00 p.m. MST. Catch it on Sportsnet.
Stats courtesy of Natural Stat Trick, the American Hockey League, and the National Hockey League.
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