Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Flames Buried by Avalance

Not even the heroics of Kipper could save the Flames in Colorado. I don't have much to say on this other than I remain hopeful that the Flames offense finds it's road legs sooner rather than later. More SOGs!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

well, i watched the game because of center ice outside alberta. very ugly. flames got a swack of unfair calls against in the 1st, and the go-ahead goal for the avs was blatant goalie interference. still, they had some good things: a great 5-on-3 PK and some great saves by kipper. going into the 3rd they were only down 2-1 and could have reasonably come back.

suffice it to say, they didn't. they played with zero urgency and played very very sloppy.

i'm not sure what's wrong with this team. while i like our 2nd line, juice-langkow-nolan/moss they never seem to carry us. and our bottom six is pretty useless, save for some occasional good cycling in the offensive zone.

our defence is what's really confusing. i think they might just be too slow. lots of mistakes in our zone: turnovers, failure to clear, and lazy shot blocks invariably mean we get hemmed in. regehr hasn't looked nearly as good as he did with leopold (save that brief stint with stuart) and we don't really have anyone for him to play with. you can't put him with phaneuf, because that would mean sarich-aucoin together, and they're too slow together.

i actually think this team could be in a bit of trouble. nothing we can't overcome, but a trade may be in order to shake up the room.

and for what it's worth, lombardi better on the top line thursday. conroy was flat out awful the last couple game and shouldn't be rewarded by playing with iggy (who was again, pretty good last night).

Anonymous said...

i should be clear on my point about our 2nd line. i don't want to take away from their skill. but when teams stifle iginla they need to be more gritty and urgent. langkow and juice are great together and their point totals prove it. i just mean that they don't seem to take the team by the next and force them to the win, when either the #1 line is shut down OR the whole team is playing lacklustre. you need your 2nd line to do this if you want a true 1-2 line punch.

walkinvisible said...

shaun: you can't put regehr with phaneuf cause they're both rights. so we're stuck with phaneuf/aucoin and regehr/sarich (or vice versa).

that's all.
:)

Anonymous said...

they're both right shots or left shots? i thought the point of bringing in aucoin was because he was a right shot (and warrener was the only right 'shot' we had last year).

anyway, you're right. we can't put them together regardless of the other combos. remember how bad they were together early last year? yikes!

Anonymous said...

or were you referring to ice-side? ugh... never mind.

Kent W. said...

Hmm...I agree with almost everything Shaun had to say.

As for the struggles of the 2nd line...I think the real problem is the lack of a capable 2nd line RWer. Nolan can't keep up. He's blows good scoring chances and muffs the cycle half the time. Juice and Langkow have to be playing lights out in order to create anything with Nolan at ES.