Flame on or flame out in Calgary?
The Calgary Flames are in a precarious position in this final week before the trade deadline. GM Jay Feaster is facing a tough decision in whether to be a buyer or seller. The Flames are currently in eighth place in the Western Conference with 65 points, the same total as the ninth place Los Angeles Kings.
The easy answer is that he’ll do everything in his power to ensure the Flames get into the playoffs. And why shouldn’t he? That is his job after all.
As Rory Boylen of The Hockey News recently stated “If you go down this route, you’re accepting the fact your team will be below average for a couple of years… If Feaster were given the mandate by ownership to forget the playoffs and set the franchise up for a push in 2015, he would have started toward the objective as soon as he arrived.”
The Flames are certainly not below average as their 15th-overall record will show. They’re not great by any means, but they are no stinker. With only a little over $1.7 million in cap space to work with at the deadline, Feaster won’t be breaking the bank on any trades, not without giving up an asset anyway. He already made his move, acquiring Mike Cammalleri from the Montreal Canadiens, though he has yet to get going with just five goals and seven points in 14 games.
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But what happens should his plan fail and the Flames miss the playoffs by just a few points? It’ll be the third consecutive season in which that’s happened. You have to be realistic and consider the possibility they will fall just short once again. The Flames are now at risk of being in no man’s land where they are not good enough to make the playoffs, but too good to get any high draft picks.
And that leads nowhere. It’s the same result season in and season out and that is not success. Success is doing better than the season before and sometimes a team has to take a small step backward in order to do take the next one forward.
The past two seasons have seen the Flames play well, just not quite well enough, recording 90 points in 2009-10 and 94 in ’10-11, missing the playoffs by five and three points respectively. This is similar to what happened to the Toronto Maple Leafs right after the lockout when they missed out on the big dance by two points in ’06 and just one in ’07. They kept putting more and more band aids on wounds that really could have used some stitches and it cost them.
Feaster has a little over $17 million to work with over the summer with 16 players signed. He can get a little more room with a buyout of Matthew Stajan who has a $3.5 million cap hit, but has just one goal, six points and is a minus-9 this season while averaging just 10:41 per game. But what should they do with that money?
They need offense badly. The Flames have a very good defense; they are 10th in the NHL in goals-against average, but are 26th in goals for. If Cammalleri cannot get back to his 30 goal, 80 point seasons, the Flames will be dangerously thin behind Olli Jokinen and Jarome Iginla – assuming Iginla’s still around. Feaster doesn’t have to start from scratch with a bunch of draft picks and prospects with no certain future, but going younger certainly wouldn’t hurt.
The Flames were ranked 27th in last year’s edition of Future Watch, published by The Hockey News and things don’t look much better this year. They did draft Sven Bartschi last summer, who is 10th in the Western Hockey League in scoring despite missing time with injury. Whether it is at the trade deadline or over the summer, it may be time for a change in Cowtown, especially if they barely miss the playoffs once again.
Should the Maple Leafs not make the playoffs this year, it’ll be eight years since their last playoff game. It has taken them six seasons to rebuild into something resembling a playoff team, but it doesn’t have to take that long. The Philadelphia Flyers were horribly mismanaged after the lockout, culminating in a last-place finish and franchise-worst 56 points in 2006-07. First-year GM Paul Holmgren had a lot of work to do, but he wasn’t afraid to make the bold moves and it all started with trading Peter Forsberg at the trade deadline. Over the following summer he acquired Kimmo Timonen and Scott Hartnell from Nashville, Jason Smith and Joffrey Lupul from Edmonton and signed top free agent Daniel Briere. They made it to the Eastern Conference final the next season.
The Flames don’t have to part with Iginla the same way the Flyers needed to cut ties with Forsberg. He was often injured and when he was able to play, was nowhere near the player he once was. Iginla is still a 30-goal scorer and one of the top leaders in the league and they could use his guidance going forward. Sure, he was once the prospect the Flames received for a star player in Joe Nieuwendyk, but with no way to guarantee that type of return again, it is really not worth the risk.
The Flames do have a chance to make the playoffs this season, though it will be a tight race between them, the Coyotes and the Kings for the final two playoff spots in the Western Conference. They just have to make sure they can be something other than a one-and-done playoff team and that it doesn’t take them 15 years to win a round like it did between 1989 and 2004. They spent a decade and a half in no man’s land, they’d better take proper steps to not do it again.
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