The Calgary Flames have come crashing back to earth.
A week ago, they were riding high and on a four-game winning streak.
After Saturday night’s lifeless 6-2 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, though, they’ve now lost four in a row and will be relishing getting back to the Saddledome after a road-trip that saw them allow 17 goals and crash down the NHL penalty-killing rankings.
For a Flames (12-9-4) team that didn’t score more than three goals in a game a single time in November, being tight defensively has been the recipe for the group to find success. That simply didn’t happen on this trip.
“We were just an easy team to play against,” Flames forward Jonathan Huberdeau told reporters in Pittsburgh. “We’re taking penalties. The PK needs to get better, too, even though we’re going to take penalties, we have to be able to kill them.
“It’s hard for us when we’re down a lot of goals and have to come back, We’ve got to come out and play harder.”
There was a lot to unpack from the Flames’ difficult four-game run out east and it’s a little hard to know how much of their struggles can be chalked up to the inevitable dips in form that happen for every NHL team in an 82-game season.
They’re still very much in a playoff position, but through two months it’s become obvious that they’re a much better team at home, where their record is 9-3-0, than they are on the road, where
they’re 3-6-4.
What explains that? It’s something the Flames themselves are trying to figure out, but the team that won four straight at the Saddledome looked completely different from the one that we saw Saturday evening.
Here are three takeaways from the loss to the Penguins:
PK STRUGGLING
There’s no sugarcoating that the Flames’ penalty killers had a rough week.
In four games, the PK allowed eight goals, including three against the Penguins.
They’re bottom-five in the NHL when down-a-man and need to improve in a hurry.
“You need to get some kills,” Flames head coach Ryan Huska told reporters. “This was a tough trip penalty-kill-wise for us. I know we’re a better group than what we showed on the penalty kill and we’re going to need to dig in with it.
“We want it to be a strength of our team and right now it’s not where it needs to be.”
The Flames showed early in the season that they’ve got the right mix of guys to run an effective penalty-kill unit, so getting home for a few days and focusing-in on what it isn’t working — and then fixing it — could make a difference.
It needs to happen fast, though.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
As bad as the final scoreline looked, the Flames actually played pretty well in the first period but just couldn’t find a way to puck a shot past Pens goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic, who was excellent all night.
He absolutely robbed Rasmus Andersson late in the first, and the inability to finish did seem to wear on the Flames.
“I thought we were frustrated tonight as the game went on, you’re not finishing the way we hoped to finish and you can sense it in them a little bit,” Huska told reporters. “But at the same time you have to stick with it and you have to have the mentality that we’re going to keep going until we earn it, and earn our breaks and earn our chances.”
The Flames got late goals from Huberdeau and Nazem Kadri, but they were already down 5-0 at the time and the Penguins’ stranglehold on the game never felt under threat.
Dan Vladar got the start in net for the Flames, and while he won’t be happy to have allowed six goals, he did make 37 saves and there were much bigger problems out there for the Flames on Saturday than their goaltending.
LOOKING BACK
The Flames finished November with a 7-6-2 record, which is only disappointing because their last four games were losses.
For those keeping track, Kadri recorded more points than any other Flames player over the month, picking up four goals and five assists in 15 games.
Matt Coronato and MacKenzie Weegar were right behind him, with eight points each in November. All eight of Weegar’s points were assists, while Coronato had four goals and four helpers.
Yegor Sharangovich led the team in goals, with five.