On most road-trips, the common wisdom is that if you go .500, you’re happy.
Not this time.
The Calgary Flames need more out of this week’s four-game swing through Toronto and the wider New York metropolitan area.
Winning two won’t be enough, not with 17 games left and not when the race for the Western Conference’s second wild card spot is deadlocked between themselves and the Vancouver Canucks.
“Four-of-four is the goal, of course,” said Flames winger Ryan Lomberg. “We’ve gotta go. It’s not the time where you can go .500 on a road-trip, and certainly not less than that. I think three-of-four is probably right where we want to be. Four-of-four would be the bar with what we’re trying to achieve.”
With games against the Chicago Blackhawks and Utah Hockey Club on Saturday and Sunday, the Canucks can potentially open up a four-point gap between themselves and the Flames before the Calgary crew even takes the ice on Monday against the Leafs.
Given that one of games is against Utah, who are only two points back of the Flames and Canucks, the race is only going to get tighter one way or another.
And after falling to the Canucks in a shootout on Wednesday and losing again to the Colorado Avalanche on Friday night, any breathing room the Flames might have afforded themselves has disappeared.
It’s unlikely, but if they were to lose all their games on this road-trip and the Canucks were to win all five games they have in the next eight days, these overachieving Flames could return to Calgary next Sunday down 10 points with only 13 games to play.
Their quest for the post-season would be over in all-but the mathematical sense.
So no, it doesn’t really matter who their opponents are. The Flames need to win more games than they lose on this trip.
“Every game is huge, it’s just tooth-and-nail,” said Flames blueliner Kevin Bahl. “We’ve got to grind out every point we can. Tough back-to-back to start, so it’s a huge road-trip and it really can make or break our season. We’ve got to go in there and find as many points as we can.”
That won’t be easy. Each of the Flames’ four opponents out east has something to play for.
The Leafs are in a dogfight for playoff positioning in an Atlantic Division where first-place will guarantee you don’t have to play either the Tampa Bay Lightning or Florida Panthers, who both look like Stanley Cup contenders.
The New York Rangers are next at Madison Square Garden and they’re right smack in the middle of an Eastern Conference wild card fight that’s just as tight as the one out west.
Then, it’s a very good New Jersey Devils team who had won three in a row and are solidly in a playoff spot in the Metropolitan Division. Finally, it’s the New York Islanders, who are in the wild card mix themselves and will be fighting for their lives, too.
The Flames will have to take on all of them without their captain Mikael Backlund, who is out week-to-week with an upper-body injury suffered against the Canucks on Wednesday. Connor Zary will serve the second of a two-game suspension and miss out against the Leafs, too.
And the Flames haven’t exactly been hot recently. They didn’t really manage to put together a full 60 minutes against any of their opponents during the three-game homestand that concluded Friday, and they’ve got 4-3-3 since the break in the NHL schedule for the Four Nations Face-Off.
They’ve scored only 21 goals in that stretch, although if you’re looking for a bright spot they’ve also allowed only 24.
Whether they rediscover their scoring touch or grind out low-scoring wins, it won’t matter. At this point in the season, the only thing that matters on this road-trip is picking up points in the standings.
“I think as a whole for the last little stretch we’ve been playing great defensively, so that’s a big positive we can feed off of,” Lomberg said. “Stay dialled in, it’s about staying patient and capitalizing on other teams’ mistakes instead of getting in a track meet and trying to go chance-for-chance. Ultimately, that’s not the style of play in the playoffs so there’s no point in playing it now because in a few weeks time we’re not going to be playing that style of hockey.”