Not sustainable.
In Calgary we’ve heard that battle cry in November, it was mentioned in December as a gotcha moment when the Flames suffered an 8 game losing streak. It was all quiet in January when they returned to winning, but returned in February and again in March when the club lost their captain and best player.
When the West ramped up and all of the 2nd tier teams began a torrid winning pace the Flames were the club picked to fall out. They didn’t have the horses, they were playing an unsustainable brand of hockey, their luck had to run out.
In the end the Flames finished 28th in possession stats in the NHL (44.5%), they should have been the same in the standings, hey with that result they would have won the lottery. Instead they made the playoffs.
Things haven’t stopped there.
In the first round the Flames had the 2nd worst possession stats once again (45.1%) with Vancouver predictably having the second best. Yet it was the Flames winning the series in six games and moving on to play the Ducks tonight in game one of the Western Conference Semi Final. (The Dubnyk fueled Minnesota Wild were the worst in possession yet I don’t hear a lot of cries suggesting they were luck to upset the Blues in the first round).
The luck just keeps on sustaining.
If you want to dial further back in time, to say January 10th, 2014 the Flames finished the 2013-14 season at a 20-17-1 rate.
Add that to this season and this year’s playoffs and you have a club putting up a 69-49-8 record for 146 points in 126 games, good for a .580 win percentage or a 95 point regular season pace.
That’s 90% of two full NHL seasons of regular season hockey.
They are sustaining this.
Luck doesn’t last two seasons. If you’re lucky it lasts 10 games, maybe a dozen. Not two seasons.
Now first let me qualify this. It isn’t an attack on advanced stats or possession numbers, they inherently make sense. By measuring shot attempts it’s not a huge leap to suggest a team that has more pucks put on or towards the opposition’s net is likely the better team. By just letting teams fire away on you it’s inevitable that you will lose more hockey games than you win.
So I understand it. I get why people looking at those numbers will again and again suggest the Flames won’t keep it up.
So how are they doing it?
More than one media outlet has pointed to the collapse of the Colorado Avalanche as the principal reason why the Flames will flounder. Its a weak comparison though because they are doing it differently. The Avalanche rode Semyan Varlamov to a division title, as their stopper won the Vezina Trophy.
The Flames had the third worst save percentage in the 20013-14 season.
They had a middling save percentage in the 2014-15 season.
In the first round their save percentage as a team was ranked 8th of 16 teams.
Middle of the pack again.
This isn’t a goaltender standing on his head, in fact you could make an argument that Calgary goaltending has been a detriment more often than a saving grace over the past two seasons, Hiller’s solid play in the first round notwithstanding.
At some point one of these very qualified advanced stats guru’s are going to make a case of the Flames and come up with a new way of looking at things, because the existing system seems to have an outlier dressed in red and they just refuse to pull back to the averages.
The Flames put a curtain around their net by collapsing down low. As a result they block more shots than any other team in the circuit, and prevent blue chip chances or rebounds from getting to Hiller or Rambo.
This isn’t the end of the trick though. No team can win a game doing that for 60 minutes as you’re luck will run out. You can’t spend all night in your own zone.
Instead they add to this by expertly corralling loose pucks and then instead of icing it to get fresh reinforcements they storm back up the ice with advantaged numbers and cram an actual blue chip chance right down the opposition’s throats.
They exchange 40 seconds of what looks like domination for 5 seconds of an actual chance to score.
It flies in the face of advanced stats.
Their shooting percentage has been high since January of 2014 because their chances to score are on average better than the average NHL shooter, and certainly better than the average of the opposition on any given night shooting through a forest of red black and gold shin pads.
Add in a high octane forecheck and a season long penchant for not taking penalties and the Flames are a tough team to beat in a 7 game series.
It’s innovative, it’s outside the box, and it’s screaming for an opposing coach to come up with a way to beat it. But they haven’t yet, and now it’s up to Bruce Boudreau to do the trick.
The Flames should lose to the Ducks in the second round. In the process the Ducks will get more shot attempts, likely more shots on goal, and have media and hockey fans outside the Calgary market screaming for the hockey god’s as the Flames look to be blown out but keep hanging in.
And a young team hanging in can gain momentum and taste blood quickly. Its in their nature and they’re more than happy to sustain it.
