Head Tale

Like many Canadians, I’ve always been a huge hockey fan.  I’ve got the requisite pictures of myself around three years old playing hockey against my grandma’s legs as she sits on the couch, I was one of those kids who could name every player on every team plus their hometowns, stats, and shooting hand.

But as I got older, other things (family, work) took more of my time and even though I still consider myself a fan, I don’t watch hockey nearly as closely as I used to.

Even with the advent of cable, I don’t watch games every night of the week  and am happy to watch a game on Saturday night if it’s a team I follow or that has a star player.
When I started following hockey seriously when I was 8 or 10, the team winning all the Stanley Cups was the 1980-84 Islanders and they quickly became my favourite team.  Bryan Trottier and Clark Gillies were both from Saskatchewan, Mike Bossy was the best natural goal scrorer of all-time (and still my favourite player ever) and don’t get me started on how money Billy Smith was in net – both in terms of stepping up for playoffs but also his aggressive, stick-swinging, in-your-face style.

The Islanders have finally  climbed out of a long walk in the desert of suckitude but I drifted away from cheering for them, especially after we moved to Calgary in 2001 (interesting that my two favourite teams of all-time – Isles & Flames – are both known for their rivalries with the Oilers!)

Anyhow, this was shaping up to be another season where I’d sort of half-follow what was going on early in the season, see my interest go as it went on but fully expected that the Flames would be a bottom 5 team after trading away or losing to retirement all of their best players.

But then something crazy happened.  The Flames were winning.  And they were winning in an exciting way so that I ended up watching pretty much EVERY SINGLE GAME (I taped the games I missed when we went to Dominican Republic and even watched them in ffwd when we got back!)  The Flames had a knack for coming back in the third period from deficits so you couldn’t turn off games, even if they were down 2, 3 or even 4 goals.

All combined, this easily turned out to be the best season of hockey I’ve ever watched and there are many, many reasons for this (much on this list cribbed from a thread I started on CalgaryPuck)…

1. The Flames were expected to be a bottom 5 team, possibly getting the Number One overall pick and ended up clinching a spot in the playoffs in the second last game of the season.
2. They did this by beating the defending Stanley Cup champs, the LA Kings, who were desperate to win to keep their playoff hopes alive and who had won something like five (?) elimination games in a row going back to the previous year’s Stanley Cup finals.
3. Flames Captain, Mark Giordano, was consensus pick for the Norris trophy for best defenceman based on the season he was having as leading d-man in the NHL.
4. After he got injured around game 60 of the 82 game season, the team was expected to fold but they actually carried on with the same team-based approach and didn’t drop off at all going 12-5-3 to earn a playoff spot.
5. A free agent brought in to help cover for the absence of Giordano, David Schlemko, got thrown into a shoot-out in one of his first games for the Flames and won it with an amazing move aka “The Schlemko“
6. Can’t take your eyes off-him, rookie sensation and Hobey Baker winner as best US college player, Johnny Gaudreau emerges as a star even though he’s a fourth-round pick and very small by NHL standards.
7. Gaudreau is odds-on favourite to win the Calder Trophy as NHL rookie of the year.
8. Sean Monahan avoids the sophomore slump to post a season with 31 goals and 31 assists which is unreal in a season when the Art Ross winner for most points only scored 87 points, barely a point-a-game pace.
9. Monahan scored 30 goals as the youngest player on the team. Only 10 other players have hit that mark in the 2000’s as 20 year olds.  Do the names Ovechkin, Stamkos, Toews, Malkin, Kovalchuk mean anything?  Because that’s pretty much the best the NHL has to offer.
10. Monahan also currently tops all scorers from his draft class even though he wasn’t picked until the sixth spot.  He’s also in second place for points, only five behind the number one pick that year.
11.  I don’t think it’s anything to do with him directly (as far as I know) but Monahan also has one of the funniest parody Twitter accounts I’ve seen, Boring Sean Monahan.
12. Jiri Hudler looks revitalized playing on a line with youngsters Gaudreau and Monahan and leads the team in scoring with 76 points, a career high and good for 8th place in the entire NHL scoring race.
13. Hudler, Monahan and Gaudreau were easily the best line in the league, arguably since Christmas and especially when it mattered during the month of March as the playoff race was at its height.
14. Coach Bob Hartley had a motto of “Always earned, never given” which the team rallied around.
15. Hartley broke the season down to a series of 7 game stretches to simulate the playoff grind and the flames went 11-2 in these series.
16. The Flames unexpected regular season coupled with the playoff berth makes Hartley another odds-on favourite for NHL hardware, namely the Jack Adams Award for Coach of the Year.
17. The Flames led the league in a number of categories this year.  Reflecting their comebacks, this included best third period goal differential.
18. Tied for most third-period come-from-behind victories. (?)
19. As part of that, they were at or near the top for third period goals and third period goal differential.
20. Possibly the most points by rookies?
21. Also second in the league (24-1-1) when leading after two periods.
22. (On that note, someone made the observation that this team never gives up and when they lose, it’s not that they lost, it’s that they ran out of time.)
23. Top shot blocker – D-man Kris Russell – set an NHL record with 274 blocked shots.
24. I might be making this one up but I think the Flames had or tied for most 10-goal scorers.
25. I don’t know if they finished with this but at one point, I’m sure the Flames led the league in 4-on-4 goals.
26. Related, I think close to an equal number of players – eleven or so – had career seasons which is extremely unusual for that to all line up for so many different players in a single season.
27. Memorable comebacks happened throughout the year but perhaps the most memorable was on February 17 when the Flames came back from 3-o in the third period to beat the Bruins 4-3 with the tying goal coming on a last minute rush with two seconds left on the clock.
28. Or maybe it was a pre-Christmas break 4-3 comeback against the LA Kings which saw Johnny Gaudreau score a natural hat trick in the third to push the game to OT before captain Mark Giordano sealed the comeback in OT.
29. Or instead of coming back from three down, what about a third-period comeback from 4-0 against their Eastern Conference over-achieving cousins, the Ottawa Senators which was only ruined by their inability to finish the game in OT?
30. Part of the comeback success was the Flames’ willingness to pull the goalie as early as with five minutes left in the game rather than following the long-established rule that the goalie gets pulled with one minute left on the clock.  I can’t remember who was playing but that led to one situation where the Flames pulled the goalie with lots of time left to get a 6-4 advantage, didn’t score, the other team’s penalty ended, they still played 6-on-5 but then finally got a whistle so they could get their goalie back in net!
31. Going something like 19-6-1 against their own division is another part of how they managed to make it to the playoffs.
32. Don’t have the stat handy but the Flames tons of scoring from the d-corps generally.
33. Speaking of, the Flames made an art of the ever-exciting stretch pass.
34. The D-men also had carte blanche to jump up into the play which also made for a very exciting team to watch.
35. Another great thing about this season was how different players stepped up at different times – everyone from Mason Raymond who was hot early in the season to AHL goalie Johnny Ortio who went 4-1 on a road trip when called up due to injuries to  the entire d-corps who all stepped up after captain Mark Giordano went down with injury, especially Dennis Wideman.
36. With the season on the line and injuries abounding, the team calls up last year’s fourth overall pick (who had been ranked first overall through most the year), Sam Bennett then chooses *not* to insert him into the lineup in games against virtual AHL teams, Edmonton and Arizona.  Instead, the Flames go with what got them there, a bunch of mostly no-name guys who are playing their heart out and buying into the team concept 100%.  And they fucking still do it – making the playoffs without Bennett who finally gets to play in the last (meaningless) game of the season against the Jets!
37. Monahan was so clutch scoring most of his 31 goals in OT and the third period.  I think at one point, he had no first period goals at all and only third period/OT goals!
38. It became a running joke that every time the Flames were down going into the third period, fans/commentators/online posters would say “The Flames have them right where they want them!”
39. Lots of fans of advanced stats kept saying the Flames would eventually regress back to normal/fall back to earth.  But in the end, the only statistic that mattered was the Flames managed to finish the season with 97 points and secure a playoff spot.
40. The 1A/1B tag team goaltending of Jonas Hiller and Kari Ramo which spread the work around and allowed the Flames to ride the hot hand and/or play the goalie who was best suited to the team they were facing each night.
41. Josh Jooris, an unheralded rookie, makes the team and even gets a hat trick in one game.
42. Flames tied the Cup winning 1989 Flames for road victories.
43. Third least penalized team in the league.
44. Johnny Gaudreau makes All-Rookie team at All-Star game then gets to participate in the skills competition and play in the big game due to injuries.
45. A few non-Flames ones…  The Oilers sucked beyond sucking which I find pretty funny given that they just keep the old boys’ club around.  I can’t find it now but I read an article recently that showed how statistically, the Oilers are exponentially worse than the other worst teams in the league.
46. The Leafs sucked too which I enjoy.
47. Other than that, five Canadian teams made the playoffs including the Sens who made it after a 20-1 run based on an out-of-nowhere, record-setting performance by a goalie named Andrew Hammond.
48. Not a huge fan of the shootout and hope the NHL decides to add some form of 3-on-3 to OT between 4-on-4 and the shootout.  With that said, the record-setting 20-round shootout between the Panthers and Capitals in December was pretty suspenseful!
49. This letter.
50. The playoff clinching second last game of the season where the Flames totally took it away from the backs-against-the-wall Stanley Cup champ, LA Kings, including a final minute empty net goal which was about as exciting and team-defining as I’ve seen – Gaudreau to Monahan to Hudler who capped a three-point night in a 3-1 victory.