Six weeks ago, it was the type of goal that wouldn’t have gone in for Connor Zary.
Midway through the second period in Thursday night’s game against the Utah Hockey Club, Zary drove the net hard and fired a shot at Karel Vejmelka. The rebound bounced out, hit him fortuitously on the leg and bounced into the back of the net.
Early in the year, he was getting into dangerous positions and firing lots of shots, but the puck just wouldn’t go in.
So he’s earned a little puck luck.
“You’ll always take those ones,” Zary said Friday from the Saddledome. “You get a little lucky and I tried to drive hard to the net and I fall down and it ends up going back off me and into the net. You take them however you can get them and they count all the same.”
With the goal, Zary joined Jonathan Huberdeau and Nazem Kadri as the third Flames player to record 10 goals this season.
It always seemed inevitable that eventually his shots were going to start finding the back of the net, but he could hardly have been blamed for getting a little frustrated early in the year.
Through the first 19 games of the season, Zary scored three goals. Through the last 19 games, he’s been rewarded a lot more often, with seven goals in that stretch.
What’s been the difference?
It hasn’t been how much he’s shot the puck. He’s fired 80 shots on net this year, with 40 in the first 19 games and 40 in the second.
He did move to centre in mid-November, though, and his third game at his new position is when his fortunes did seem to turn.
He’s also been on a rejuvenated Flames power play, and head coach Ryan Huska believes his play on the man advantage has helped, even if he’s scored only once on the power play.
Playing in the middle between Jakob Pelletier and Yegor Sharangovich has contributed, too, although Huska still wants to see more from the trio.
“I haven’t seen as much chemistry with the line as I would have liked to have seen,” Huska said. “There are stretches where I’m like ‘OK, I think we’ve got something here’ and there are stretches where I’m like ‘Come on boys’ but I do feel like his play with the puck has been really good and he’s got that swagger to him.
“It’s now just continuing to build on the rest of his game and that’s going to make him a guy who is on the ice when we’re protecting a one-goal lead late in the game. That’s ultimately what you want for a player like Connor, is to be a guy who is used in every key situation.”
There’s been progress in Zary’s all-round game, to be sure, but it’s also been important that he’s started to score goals. The Flames aren’t a high-scoring team — only seven teams in the NHL have scored fewer than the 104 goals they’ve managed — and need guys like Zary contributing on a nightly basis.
And he’s been doing that recently. They haven’t all been pretty, but Zary’s scored three goals in his last five games. To double-down on the point, that’s as many as he scored in his first 19 this season, as we mentioned earlier.
Against Utah, he was crashing the net. On New Year’s Eve against the Vancouver Canucks, he cleaned up a rebound after a Pelletier breakaway. Before Christmas against the Chicago Blackhawks, Zary was in front of the net and fired the puck in after a rebound.
“I think he’s really good in front of the net,” Pelletier said. “His last three or four goals are right in front of the net, inside the blue paint. When you look at that, no wonder he has 10 goals this season already, he can score on the outside but he’s also not afraid to go inside.”
Zary was getting in front of the net early in the season, too. There were never any concerns about his game from the Flames coaching staff, who emphasized again and again that he just needed to stay patient.
He did, and now he’s getting rewarded.
“It’s easy to get frustrated and there were times when I did get frustrated but you’re trying to stay on track as best you can and create those chances because if you create those chances eventually you’re going to get a little puck luck,” Zary said. “I still think there’s lots of chances where I can produce more and score more, so I think stay on that same train but it’s nice to get rewarded a couple extra times here and there.”
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