The Calgary Flames insist the goals are going to come.
They’re going to need to, one way or another.
From the Flames’ perspective, there are ebbs and flows in every team’s season. You go hot and cold, you go through streaks and slumps and are going to have periods where you score a lot of goals and others where the back of the net is impossible to find.
Right now, they’re quite clearly mired in a slump.
After coming out of the 4 Nations Face-Off break and impressing with back-to-back wins over the San Jose Sharks and Washington Capitals, they were shut out in two straight against the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers before picking up a point in an overtime loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday afternoon.
Given the quality of the opposition, there’s no real shame in dropping those games.
What has been more worrying is the lack of offence.
For one reason or another, they’ve gone ice-cold, scoring only once in nine periods.
There’s no way of sugarcoating that. You won’t win games if you don’t score.
“It sucks,” Flames centre Nazem Kadri told reporters in Carolina on Sunday. “Any guys who wants to score goals, it’s not great. I’ve seen this a million times, there are certain stretches in the season where, for whatever reason, you got a little bit cold or you get hot. It works on both ends of the spectrum. Right now, we’ve got to work a little bit harder to get goals but they’ll come and they’ll come in bunches.”
They need to come soon.
The point the Flames earned by forcing overtime on Sunday pushed them into the Western Conference’s second wild-card position, but it’s as tight as can be.
And it’s not just that the Flames are tied on points with the Vancouver Canucks. Both Western Canadian teams have 65 points, but the last week has seen the St. Louis Blues crawl back into the race with 64 points and the Utah Hockey Club are only one point back of them with 63.
Suddenly, this is a four-horse race we’re talking about and the three teams the Flames are fighting with all have better records over their past 10 games.
Now, it hasn’t all been bad for the Flames this week. Not at all.
They were happy with the way they played against the Tampa Bay Lightning. They fought hard and competed well, they just couldn’t get the puck past a red-hot Andrei Vasilevskiy.
The less said about the game against the Panthers, the better. It was a dud, plain and simple.
But after a brutal first period against the Hurricanes, things clicked into gear in the second and third and at least Kadri was able to end their goalless drought of 171 minutes and 34 seconds.
And, fortunately, Tuesday’s matchup with the Philadelphia Flyers should provide an easier test. The Flyers have allowed the fifth-most goals in the entire NHL this season, while the Flames past three opponents are all among the league’s 10 stingiest.
Furthermore, the Flames believe they are due.
“It’s going to come,” Flames head coach Ryan Huska told reporters. “You go through stretches and, unfortunately, we’re in one right now but we found a way to get a point in a difficult building and that’s something for us to build on.”
The hope is that the game against the Hurricanes was a step in the right direction.
The Flames are not a team that is going to win games by scoring five every night and winning track meets. Their formula for success is playing tight-checking, hard-forechecking, defensively responsible hockey.
But they do need to score and they need goals from more than just their top line. The trio of Kadri, Jonathan Huberdeau and Matt Coronato have scored four of the seven goals the Flames have managed in their five games since the break.
Fourth-liners Martin Pospisil and Kevin Rooney have one apiece while blueliner Joel Hanley has the other, his only goal this season.
There’s a long list of forwards who haven’t managed to contribute offensively.
The Flames need them to start back up and they need it to happen as soon as possible.