Flames Season Review - Part One.

I've decided to separate the season review into a couple of parts. This first post is centered on explicating the general processes that informed the Flames year, largely from the management perspective. In the second part, I'll concentrate on the particular manifestations of managements efforts in the Flames roster.

The best way to start off may be to establish that the 07-08 Calgary Flames weren't a bad team. They contended for the NW title for awhile in mid-season. They scored a couple more goals than they gave up. And they made the play-offs despite playing in a tough division and competitive conference.

The best way to continue may be to be to acknowledge that the 07-08 Calgary Flames weren't a good team either. They had the second worst GD of any WC play-off squad. They didn't even have average special teams. And they squeaked into the play-offs by the hairs of their chiny-chin-chin.

One of Darryl Sutter's favorite hobbies when granting interviews is to glibly dismiss the bleating of the press or fanbase as short-sighted or ill-informed. This year, as the club stumbled down the stretch and the possibility of missing the play-offs loomed large in March, Sutter answered the faithful's anxiety by peddling "parity": the team's tenuous grasp on a play-off position was attributed to the league's increasingly large middle class.

It's seems a legitimate argument on the face of it. Thanks to three-point games and the salary cap's influence on the concentration of talent, the difference between the "haves" and "have nots" has indeed been eroded since the lock-out. For exmaple, the Minnesota Wild won the NW Division with 98 points this year. The Canucks, who were a mere 10 points back, placed last. The difference between the two teams goal differentials was 7.

Even with that in mind, When I first heard the Sutter interview in March his claim struck me as a bit of ass-covering sophistry. "Okay is not okay" was one of his famous lines from the previous off-season. "Okay is simply inevitable" seemed to be the new Franchise motto come the end the regular season, however.

I guess the question is: is just okay...okay? Should fans and pundits be adjusting their expectations for the Flames given the landscape of the "new NHL"?

Bull-shit I say. I have a few weeks between me and that Sutter interview and it still strikes me as utter bullshit. The increased parity in the league hasn't eliminated elite teams; it doesn't ensure mediocrity across the board, nor does it explain the Flames second straight season as first-round fodder. The Calgary Flames have elite players at every level of their roster. Iginla, Tanguay, Regehr, Phaneuf, Kiprusoff. Two of those guys are top 10 forwards in terms of ES production, another 2 are top 10 defensemen (albeit in different ways) and Kipper is two years removed from a Vezina trophy. This isn't the foundation of a middling squad. This is a talent core Sutter has gone to pains to lock-up long-term, and for good reason - most GMs would kill for it.

Let's look at it another way. The Nashville Predators, who finished in 8th place, just behind Calgary, sold off a bunch of their difference makers last year. They dealt their #1 goalie, their #1 defensemen, a couple of younger pieces (Hartnell, Upshall) and lost Forsberg and Kariya in the summer. Due to ownership and budgetary concerns, the free agent signings and roster expenses were scaled back. Nashville ended up with a $36M team - a full 12M less than Sutter's roster. They muddled along with Dan Ellis and Chris Mason in net. Dan Hamhuis was their #1 defenseman and Shea Weber was injured half the year. Jason Arnott and JP Dumont were two thirds of their #1 line (not exactly beasts at taking on the tough competition) and Mike Sullivan didn't play a game thanks to his back issues...

Nashville ended the season with 3 less points than the Flames, and 1 less win. The team's goal differentials were virtually identical (+1, +2). Granted, the Predators played in the relatively weaker Central Division...but they also had less difference makers at key positions, a vastly cheaper roster and more injuries to significant pieces.

To my eye, the issue isn't simply "achieving a moderate level of success" that can be reasonably expected of most teams. The Flames aren't most teams. More accurately, they don't have to be. They don't have the budgetary concerns of a Nashville or Phoenix. They have an enviable core of talent - arguably superior than a number of clubs that sit above them in the standings (and are still playing in the post-season). The apparent "win-now" attitude of Sutter and management the last two seasons was not ill-advised given the quality of core players on hand. Ill-executed, perhaps. But sensible considering where guys like Kipper, Iginla, Regehr and Tanguay were (are) in their careers.

Ironically, it's been Sutter's flavor of "go for it" that has sunk the team into mediocrity since 03/04, and painted the franchise into the cap-strapped corner it's in now. His tendency to fill roster spots with known commodities - ex-Sutterites and veterans - has bloated the roster's budget and bled the team of cheap talent. As Darryl has gone about locking up key pieces to long-terms deals and exponentially more expensive contract extensions, he's also surrounded them with slowing vets (Nilson, Yelle, Primeau, Eriksson, Aucoin, Amonte) and dubious reclamation projects (Zyuzin, Friesen), many of whom for multi-year, multi-million dollar deals. The results, both this season and last, were two-fold:

- A cap inefficient roster - At various points this year, the Flames had Rhett Warrener (2.35M), Marcus Nilson (1M), Wayne Primeau (1.4M) and Anders Eriksson (1.5M) sitting in the press-box as healthy scratches. That's 6.25M (or difference-maker money) worth of dead-weight on any given night.And I didn't include 4M worth of Adrian Aucoin playing in the 3rd pairing, or guys like Smith (400k) or Godard (400k) skating around pointlessly. All of the bad money listed in the first sentence carries forward to next season, by the way.

- A relatively hostile development environment - The preponderance of million dollar vets makes for a crowded roster. Rookies and prospects not named "Dion Phaneuf" need some at bats to establish themselves as NHL caliber players. They require roster spots and time on the ice to develop. Spot duty on the 4th line with Godard or banishment to the press-box after a rough game - if you make the team at all of course - doesn't cut it. Mark Giordano outplayed a couple of vets (Zyuzin, Hale...Warrener arguably) last season on an already crowded blueline, despite being an undrafted freshman. Sutter, naturally, responded by offering him a nominal two-way deal and then signing useless tit Anders Eriksson to a one-way, multi-year, multi-million dollar contract in a sudden fit of "my cock is bigger than yours" when Gio understandably balked. Getting a fringe player like Eriksson for that long and for that kind of cash is questionable management on it's own. Losing a cheap, young, relatively effective replacement level player as a result is that much worse.

Even if the kids aren't any better than the incumbent vets initially, they have the advantages of being cheaper and potentially improving. Mark Giordano at 800k > Eriksson at 1.5M, even if their performance levels are comparable for the season, due in part to the cap-savings and in part to the potential development and progression of the youngster going forward. Eriksson at 1.5M and 30+ years old is, at best, a diminishing asset. You pay for the experience but the BEST he can do is play up to the value of his contract. Rookies are riskier in terms of the range and variance of their performance, but the gamble is accompanied by the attendant reward of a guy out-performing his salary. Which is gold in a capped environment.

I've heard arguments that Sutter has been constrained by the Flames rather lackluster collection of young talent during his reign. To some degree, that's true. Calgary's prospect cupboard was pretty bare when Sutter ascended to office in 04. He's spent time gathering draft picks and establishing a capable farm system the last 4 or 5 years. And good on him. But the fact that the Flames don't have a lot of sure-fire NHLers makes the loss of guys like Giordano and Taratukhin that much more egregious since the basic tenants of any given marketplace are: low supply/high demand. As such, if you don't have a great deal of high quality prospects, you should probably protect and covet the ones you DO have. Insisting your lone NHL ready defensive prospect agree to a two-way deal, for example, is a silly hill to die on.

Of course, suppressing the kids hasn't been Sutter's lone folly. That would be forgivable if he was loading up on good value vets in the kids stead. But he hasn't done that either. I think part of the reason Owen Nolan has been so favorably received this year is because he looked positively herculean when compared to many of Sutter's other recent acquisitions (Amonte, Friesen, Eriksson, Zyuzin, McCarty, Eriksson, Aucoin, Primeau, Lundmark, Boucher, Leclerc). Look at that list again. That's a whole lot of SUCK that's passed through here the last couple of years and a great deal of it wasn't (isn't) cheap. In the same time frame, the Flames have lost guys like Commodore, Lydman, Reinprecht, Kobasew, Ference, Gelinas, Donovan and the aforementioned defectors (Gio, Taratukhin) for little or nothing. And none of them are or were prohibitively expensive (Lydman and Gelinas are the priciest at about 2.8M each).

Sutter has done a great job of identifying and locking up the core big boys during his time here. Alternatively, he's done a fairly terrible job of identifying and installing good-value guys at the roster's edges. Which is why the results have been so average the last few years. There's been a couple decent contracts (Huselius @ 1.4, Lombardi @ 1.817 and Langkow @ 2.4), but not enough to overcome the sheer volume of bad-value guys. It's why the organization is at the precipice of it's most difficult and contentious off-season in Sutter's time here: a lot of the good value contracts go away and a lot of the dead-weight needs to be purged. The former is a guarantee to happen. The latter will require a small miracle.