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Mountain Man said:
Yeah, Jets and Preds will play in the second round most likely. Pittsburgh looks good, maybe a 3-peat?
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The Penguins got crushed tonight. I'm wondering if Columbus could pull an upset? They looked good down the stretch. I'd like to see them make it past the first round. Call me unpatriotic, but I'm cheering for Columbus, Washington or Nashville. I work with a Jets fan and a Leafs fan and thy're both obnoxious.
 
Gulutzan, Cameron and Jerrard all got fired yesterday, no surprise as the team had no heart in the last 20 games so there is clearly a leadership problem. I think Gelinas still has a job though...
 
Hurray Caps! I don't know if I'm more happy to see a deserving franchise win the cup or see an undeserving one lose. Either way, I think we all owe Ovi & Co. for sparing us the hideous embarrassment of Vegas winning in it's first season.

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It's been a bit of a morgue in here and not without good reason, but we're now into one of the best part of the year: The Exciting Part of Post-Season! What are your thoughts on Flames recent moves and speculation on their post season plan?

  1. New head coach Bill Peters, are you for or against?
  2. Bryout? Buy, trade or keep Troy Bouwer?
  3. Jonathan Tavares hopeless pipedream or extremely hopeless pipedream?
  4. Top 6 Right Wingers, where are we gonna get some?
  5. Anything else fun and wacky you can think of!
Here's my thoughts.
  1. I wasn't a fan of the signing, I've warmed to it a bit after hearing him speak and other speak about him, but the proof is in the pudding. And the plain truth is that this guy has never taken a team to the post season. He's going to have to prove a lot quickly, but at least his defences have had decent shot against numbers. The biggest differences might be made on special teams. We need to be better than 3rd last on the PP.
  2. I read something today that says this will be the cheapest year to buy him out. So if we can't trade him, bry him out.
  3. After talking it over with a buddy we felt like STL, MIN, TOR and SJS were maybe in the best position to chase him down. Calgary isn't quite chopped liver though. We have Hamonic, who he has played all but 2 seasons of his professional career with. We have the cap room and we have at least a few wingers he wouldn't have to toss up on his back and haul across the goal line. I think the biggest thing going against us has to be ownership and coaching. Why would he want to leave the precarious Islanders situation just to jump back in in Calgary. I'd give TOR top odds. He's local and they're competitive even without him.
  4. I'd love to see the Flames take a shot at Phil Kessel. He and PIT are said to be parting ways and that PIT has need of young defencemen which Calgary could fill in. Apart from that, Nino Niederreiter's name has come up a bunch and a couple of Montreal guys, Galchenyuk and Gallagher. I say go for it if the price is right, they all sound like they could be an improvement over what we're currently getting.
  5. I thought Jay Beagle was a really great in the playoffs. He's set to be a free agent this year and he'd be a great anchor for our bottom 6. He's almost never had a negative face off percentage, his work load is skewed towards the defensive zone and he still manages to be productive while averaging under 15 minutes of ice time again. Not to mention he's a Calgary native with a big body. He's listed at 6'3" and 220lbs. I'd way rather see them go after a guy like him than settle for a potential returnee like Stajan.
 
Same here on the caps win. Thankful Vegas didn't win, disappointed they got as far as they did. I would've preferred Winnipeg to win it (can you imagine the celebrations? their arena was full even during AWAY games!), but Ovi deserved this too.
  1. agreed fully. I dunno if he’s leaps and bounds better than gulutzan coaching and experience wise, but we were kind of inexplicably bad this year and it might just need a change up to solve. Assistant coaches seem like good choices, I expect, nay demand, a top 10 PP this year, no less.
  2. As someone who tries very hard to give players like Brouwer a decent amount of slack, i can’t find a reason to anymore. This season brought about so much disappointment for me personally, and $4.5M/year for an aging, unproductive player who’s missed probably 10 or more open nets over the course of the season just doesn’t cut it. If they don’t buy him out, at least with new coaches the reign of Brouwer on the PP will most likely end.
  3. I think JT would be cool but I doubt it. With his probable cap hit being $5-8M, he would have to take Gaudreau’s spot on the first line to be worth it, which is a no for me. There’s no reason to force a great player to the 2nd line or his offside to accommodate another great player. I see someone like Jay Beagle or something to be pretty good though. I'd want some additions like how Winnipeg added Statsny. He's a really solid pickup and strong producer, and he solidified their group. Same thing needs to happen here.
  4. Watching the playoffs and around the league, I think we could go shopping anywhere that needs young d-men or goalies. With the Leaf’s annual collapse coming at a pretty pathetic time, once again at the hands of mediocre defence, I think Brodie and Stone could feasibly go there in exchange for JVR or something equivalent. Carolina and NYI seem to need goalies. We can only have two, a starter and a backup. We have Smith, Rittich, Gillies, and Parsons upcoming. I’d ship Rittich and Gillies a bit, see what teams would pay for one of them. They’re both talented and I’ll be sad to see either go, but I’ll be sadder to have another mediocre season.
  5. I think, just an atmospheric thing at the ‘dome, it would help if they painted the strips between each glass panel red or orange, like how Nashville’s is yellow, Tampa’s is blue, etc. Just small things like that, add to the thematics of it all. It’s a little awkward we still haven’t had any traction on the fabled new arena, so we’ll probably have another 5-10+ years in the dome before it’s done and we may as well do some little, cheap things like that.
  6. As for the design of the arena, this might make the arena seem a little too full of itself, but it would be cool to have a circular/oval shaped arena, kind of wrapped in red and orange flame-shaped panels or whatever. A big outside LED screen like in Vegas or on the roof like in Detroit would be neat, but I dunno how that’d hold up against our weather. Regardless of my silly ideas, I just really hope to 1) see some traction or progress or something soon (really don't want to lose this team, and I think Bettman's insane enough to let it happen), and 2) See a good design. I really like T Mobile Arena, Pepsi Centre, the entrance to Amalie Arena, and Little Caesar's Arena, and I'd be really pleased with something like that. We have Telus Sky, the new Central Library, the National Music Centre, etc that are all beautiful and unique buildings. We shouldn't settle for a box, or worse, a fugly sandwich (cough CalgaryNEXT).
 
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I'm mostly in agreement with you, but I think you've substantially underpriced JT. I can't imagine he gets much less than Anze Kopitar at $10M. No one can make more than McDavid at $12.5M, cause that would be foolish, but I can see him sliding in between $9.5M and $11.5M. Secondly, he's a centre so he would definitely be on the top line. Monahan would be taking a back seat to him in the event of a squadron of flying pigs doing formation flying by the Calgary Tower and JT inks a contract here. He'd either be on a line with either Gaudreau or Tkachuk.

Also, JVR is a UFA so no trade necessary. Just dollars. He's also listed as an LW and I have no idea how often he plays his off wing. From the Leafs, Marner had success at one time playing RW on a line with Tkachuk in London. He's listed as a centre now, but he could be handy to have. He'd have to come at a he'll of a price though, I'm sure.
 
Oddball said:
I'm mostly in agreement with you, but I think you've substantially underpriced JT. I can't imagine he gets much less than Anze Kopitar at $10M. No one can make more than McDavid at $12.5M, cause that would be foolish, but I can see him sliding in between $9.5M and $11.5M. Secondly, he's a centre so he would definitely be on the top line. Monahan would be taking a back seat to him in the event of a squadron of flying pigs doing formation flying by the Calgary Tower and JT inks a contract here. He'd either be on a line with either Gaudreau or Tkachuk.

Also, JVR is a UFA so no trade necessary. Just dollars. He's also listed as an LW and I have no idea how often he plays his off wing. From the Leafs, Marner had success at one time playing RW on a line with Tkachuk in London. He's listed as a centre now, but he could be handy to have. He'd have to come at a he'll of a price though, I'm sure.
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Ah, that's right ... I remember reading in some article he would kinda have to replace someone on the top line, for some reason I thought it was Gaudreau, but yeah you're right ... he's a centre, my bad haha. I definitely think we could justifiably sign him at over $10M here and I think he's an absolute beast, I'd honestly love to have him, but we have to re-sign Tkachuk and Jankowski soon, probably both with significant pay raises, as well as several others. Cap might start to become an issue. Dropping Brouwer would help I suppose. I dunno if we could "keep" Monahan (mentally speaking,) if we moved him down to the 2nd line. Being top of the team for so long then replaced by another at still a rather young age can't feel great.
But yeah at the end of the day I think it's worth at least meeting with JT (supposedly Vancouver has). And I'd love to see one of the heavy Leafs scorers come over here.
 
I was very happy top see the Caps win. Probably the happiest I've been in a non-Calgary Flames final since Boston beat Vancouver or Carolina beat Edmonton. I was okay with Vegas getting to the cup, but definitely didn't want them to win it. I agree with Odball, it would have been kind of embarrassing for an expansion team to win it first season, not to mention the Caps have been a good team for a long time and Ovi has been a star for a long time. The scenes of the crowds in the streets in Washington was amazing also....for a city that couldn't have cared less about hockey 20 years ago, this was cool to watch.
 
As for the Flames and what they need to do going forward, that's a good question. The problem is that I don't really know how good this team is, as they seem to have a ,lot of good pieces on paper but didn't get it together. Could it just be coaching? Could it even be something as simple as fixing the power play? Remember Winnipeg last year....3rd from the bottom of the league, they didn't really make any changes to the team, and voila.. Ottawa conversely was an over time goal away from going to the cup last season and was MIA this year. Sometimes I think that it's little things that can make a difference in a highly competitive league like the NHL.
 
Day or two old news now, but the Flames have also signed Yasin Ehliz, a German forward, and Swedish d-man Marcus Hogstrom.

Supposedly they’ll both just be AHL players for now. Were these good pick-ups? Should we be trading them for someone bigger, or keep them?

I think we have enough young defensemen as is, and Marcus doesn’t seem spectacular. I could see Ehliz as a bottom 6 forward, at least to try, but i wouldn’t lose sleep over both of them being components in a larger trade either.

Without a draft pick I guess we may as well load up on some cheap assets to shop around with.
 
I have no idea if these guys are going to turn into anything more than AHLers. Calgary has had a habit under Treliving of doing an annual European fishing expedition. Over the years that's included guys like Wolf, Pribyl and Nakladal. So far the only one that's really amounted to anything at the top level is Rittich, but even if it's only one out of every 10 I think that pretty much justifies the excursion. I don't see either of them taking potential spots away from more established prospects, but then we didn't see it coming with Rittich either.
 
This morning, the Flames' owners agreed to resume arena negotiations with a "preliminary discussion to determine what may have changed the city's view to warrant our re-engaging." Ken King stated, however, that all negotiations are to happen behind closed doors, keeping the media and public out of it.
I'm torn. We're probably going to be paying for at least some of it, so we should know what we're buying into ... but then again if both parties agree to keep the talks confidential, that also means Bettman will finally have to shut up and stop berating Calgary.
I hope.
 
I guess it's good that they're talking again, but I'm not too optimistic as long as Ken King is at the other side of the table for the Flames. I also don't like their request for closed door negotiations, they know that it weakens the city's position to not have it's enraged citizenry telling the Flames where they can stuff their ridiculous offer. But, it's probably also normal for this business to be conducted behind closed doors. I just don't like the really high handed attitude the team is taking.

I read today that Daryl Sutter is officially retiring from coach. It made me particularly upset to hear that he would have considered an offer from Calgary, but that they didn't even call. There's no question I'd rather have Sutter behind the bench than Bill Peters.
 
I second that on Sutter. This summer seems to be playing out as the off-season for Canadian GMs to be absolute idiots, what with the Ottawa and Montreal trades and Calgary not even talking to any other coaches.
I'm fully willing to give Peters a chance, but I just find it shady that literally not ONE other coach was even considered.
 
There's been some rumors floating around that the Flames are considering trading Dougie Hamilton. I think that's a terrible move.
He's a top-scoring D-man in the NHL on a team that lacks scoring, and they'd even consider trading him?
I'd much rather see Brodie or Stone, or both go before Dougie. Only way I'd really be intrigued would be if he were to be part of a deal that brought Tavares or Karlsson to Calgary. Other than that, I'd like him to stay here.
Thoughts?
 
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