“We’re in a pit of doom right now, but we’ve got to climb out of it.”
That’s how Mikael Backlund described the Calgary Flames to reporters after their 5-1 loss to the Utah Hockey Club on Wednesday night.
Backlund is not a man who is prone to hyperbole, so it says something when the Flames captain is using terms like “pit of doom” right after playing his 1,000th game in the NHL.
But it’s certainly understandable.
After losing 5-0 to the Vegas Golden Knights on Monday, the Flames (5-4-1) had vowed to be better. Against Utah (5-4-2), they were not, and wound up on the losing end of a 5-1 scoreline.
“Right from the start they were the better team. They had a little more jump, they had more urgency than us, I felt, throughout the game. It’s a tough one,” Backlund told reporters.
There were few positives from the Flames’ performances on the road this week. At least Monday’s shutout loss was against one of the NHL’s elite teams. Wednesday’s defeat came against a Utah squad that the Flames should be able to compete with.
Instead, they got away from the relentless forecheck that served them so well when they opened the season with a 5-0-1 record. They’ve now lost four in a row.
“There’s not a lot of sugarcoating that can be done tonight,” Flames head coach Ryan Huska told reporters in Utah. “It’s something that hopefully the room recognizes and understands that the last two games the work ethic hasn’t been where it needs to be.
“For me, that starts right at the top and works its way right down. That’s a big reason why we’ve scored one goal in two games and we’ve given up 10.”
Were there positives? Anthony Mantha scored for the first time in six games, so that was good.
But otherwise, they were hard to find.
Here’s three takeaways from Wednesday’s loss:
SPECIAL TEAMS
If there’s one area where you can find dramatic change between the Flames in their first six games when they were 5-0-1 and their last four, it’s their play on both the penalty-kill and power-play.
The difference is stark, to put it plainly.
Through the first six games of the season, the Flames had converted on 23.8% (5-for-21) of their power-play opportunities. In their last four, they’ve gone 0-for-10. No goals. Zero per cent.
When they were down a man, meanwhile, the Flames had killed off 16-of-21 (76.2%) opportunities in their first six games. In the last four, they’ve killed only 8-of-13 opportunities (61.5%) that their opponents have had.
Teams win and lose games based on what happens when guys are in the penalty box, and it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the decline of both the power-play and penalty-kill has coincided with a dramatic change of fortunes in the win-loss column for the Flames.
WOLF’S TOUGH NIGHT
Nights like Wednesday are going to happen for a young goalie, and you certainly can’t pin the result on Dustin Wolf.
He’s been better this season, to be sure, and surely would have liked to have stopped more than 23 of the 28 shots he faced.
With the exception of Barrett Hayton’s goal late in the first period, though, you couldn’t fairly say any of Utah’s other goals were really his fault.
Several came through screens and Mikhail Sergachev’s second period goal was also on a five-on-three after a somewhat questionable call against Blake Coleman while Anthony Mantha was already in the box.
Given that Dan Vladar also allowed five goals against the Golden Knights on Monday, we’re probably no closer to knowing which one of the Flames’ two options in net is going to take over and be given the majority of the playing time.
You’d expect Wolf to bounce back the next time he plays and the same can probably be said about Vladar. Neither guy was the main culprit in what’s happened in the back-to-back losses the Flames suffered on the road this week.
GET DEEP
Listening to the Flames’ post-game comments after Wednesday’s loss, the one thing that came up again and again is that they believe they’ve gotten away from the hard forechecking style they need to play if they’re going to win games.
The message since the start of training camp has been that the Flames know they need to be hard to play against, get pucks deep and chase them down relentlessly.
And the last two games, they just don’t feel like they’ve been doing that.
“We haven’t got pucks into a place where we can get them back,” Backlund explained to reporters in Utah. “We’re a good forechecking team when we play the right way. We pressure teams and we’re aggressive with our d-men and forwards reloading. We make it hard on teams and we haven’t done that the last two games.”
That style-of-play is demanding and is hard to maintain on a night-to-night basis for a full 82 games, but the Flames also clearly believe it’s the approach they need to take if they’re going to win more than they lose.
Between the huge celebration for Mikael Backlund’s 1,000th game and the return of Jacob Markstrom with the New Jersey Devils on Friday, you’d expect them to have all the motivation they need to put in the work on Friday.
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