Calgary Flames coming together at the right time? (Trending Topics)

At the beginning of the season, the Calgary Flames were horrendous.

They started the year 5-10-1 and to watch them play was a chore. Most of the players — even those who’d been linemates and pairing partners for years — simply didn’t look like they’d ever played together before, and offseason pickup Brian Elliott couldn’t make a stop to save his life.

There were, however, mitigating factors. For one thing, injuries (like Sean Monahan’s) and contract disputes (like Johnny Gaudreau’s) shortened the runway for important players to get their feet under them in the preseason. Plus there was the new coach and his odd insistence on mixing up the lineup on a regular basis, putting guys who didn’t belong together out in situations they shouldn’t have been in. And as for Elliott, well, let’s just say the team in front of him didn’t exactly have defensive play resembling what he’d seen in St. Louis the previous few seasons.

To start with just nine points in your first 16 games puts you at a significant disadvantage in terms of the standings. To their credit, the Flames have made up a ton of ground since.

There are many reasons why this is, but perhaps the most important is that Monahan and Gaudreau have really come together again in the past two or three months, Elliott is now playing to a level more like his body of work in St. Louis, and Glen Gulutzan’s systems seem to be working well now that everyone is acclimated to them.

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The Flames are 38-20-3 since that ugly one-month stretch to start the season, a pace for 106 points over 82 games. And while that number might be a little bit high in terms of what their actual quality is, it’s also fair to say that they should have never even been remotely as bad as they were to start the year.

You can see here the quality of play at 5-on-5 has been on the rise for some time now, after a start so bad even Bob Hartley would have been embarrassed to go through it (with last season included below to contextualize how bad the start of the year was).

So the question is: Why?

Part of the problem was that early in the season, Gulutzan did what I think most rational people would have done, and kept Mark Giordano and T.J. Brodie together as a high-end defensive pairing that had been working together well for years. But the problem was that this left Dougie Hamilton, a younger guy who has often been shepherded along in his career by elite defenders (like Zdeno Chara before the trade), to play with Jyrki Jokipakka for that first futile stretch of the season.

You’ll be shocked to find: the top pairing was good, and the middle pairing was very bad, despite Hamilton’s high-end talent. He just didn’t have it in him to lug Jokipakka around. And things got so tough that there were actually rumors that the Flames might look to trade Hamilton because he was drowning with that anchor tied around his neck.

But around mid-November, Gulutzan threw him a life preserver: Hamilton started playing with Giordano. And to Travis Yost’s point earlier in the week, they’ve been unbelievable ever since. You can see on the chart below almost the exact point at which Giordano and Hamilton were put together, and how quickly their game took off shortly thereafter. I mean, they have topped a 70 percent expected-goals ratio over a 10-game stretch. They’re still well above 60 almost a month later. It’s truly incredible.

(This isn’t a knock on Hamilton to say he needs to play with great players to also be great. He probably doesn’t. He just needs to not-play with bad players to be good. He, Giordano, and Brodie comprise probably the best top-three D of any team in the league. But Dennis Wideman and Michael Stone aren’t answers for a real contender’s Nos. 4 and 5.)

The problem for Brodie, also great though he may be, is that the Flames really don’t have a serviceable No. 4 defenseman. For the most part, they used Dennis Wideman, and he’s fine I guess (certainly he’s better than Hamilton’s partners earlier in the season). Even with Wideman, Brodie also occasionally has hit well above 60 percent in terms of xGF% over various 10-game stretches, and that’s incredible, but sometimes he’s just gonna hit a speed bump because he doesn’t have much help.

But let’s put it this way: even after those early struggles and a lackluster partner, Brodie’s got a season-long xGF% of 48, and he’s played almost twice as many minutes with Deryk Engelland as he has with Giordano, and four times as much as he has with Hamilton. I think we can forgive him the sub-50 number.

Things have also changed considerably on the offensive side, though. Gaudreau’s been filling up highlight reels for the last little while here, and even in a season where he only had five goals and 11 points in his first 17 games, the fact that he’s still likely to hit 65 in what we’d all agree is a “down year” for a 23-year-old is amazing. Monahan, too, recovered from a tough start and has an outside shot at clearing 60 points for the third straight season.

But even when those two higher-end forwards weren’t scoring, the work of the so-called 3M line — Mikael Backlund, Matthew Tkachuk, and Michael Frolik — has also been incredible in support. The Flames have had good first lines in the past but were often doomed by a total lack of offensive depth. The 3M line really holds things together when Gaudreau and Monahan are not on the ice.

They’ve been such a huge fixture for the Flames all year; Tkachuk doesn’t even have 40 minutes of 5-on-5 ice time played with any two other Flames forwards, combined. And when he has he’s stayed with Backlund while Frolik freelanced elsewhere.

That trio’s combined 5-on-5 attempts, scoring chances, shots, expected goals, and actual goals are all, even after adjustment for outside factors, at least 58 percent. Again, this is a bonkers number that you just don’t see most nights. Let’s put it this way: In terms of adjusted expected-goals, the 3M boys trail only the Granlund-Koivu-Zucker line in Minnesota and the Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak line in Boston. These are elite units, and even they don’t have the luxury of coming over the boards after someone else on that team scored, which Gaudreau-Monahan-Whoever do regularly now.

And when you get in between the pipes and look at things, that added depth really starts to pay off over the course of the season. The number of expected 5-on-5 goals against Brian Elliott and Chad Johnson they faced every 60 minutes in the early part of the season trended toward about 2.75 and 2.8, which is in the same ballpark as the Stars and Islanders, ranked in the mid-20s league-wide. Lately they’ve been closer to 2.35 and 2.4, which puts them in the Anaheim/Washington area, among the higher-end teams in the league, the lower-end top-10.

It’s no wonder they’re getting more stops now, even if all other factors were equal, which they’re not.

This is a team that has improved dramatically over the course of the season and as it addresses some depth issues in the summer, it should continue to get better to the extent that finding depth defenders might not be too hard around the expansion draft.

Until then, though, this is still a team that looks pretty dangerous right now. Since the start of March, their percentage of various 5-on-5 stats are as follows: seventh in shot attempts, eighth in scoring chances and expected goals, 14th in shots on goal, and ninth in actual goals.

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They are at this point all but guaranteed to make the playoffs. They’ll probably be the first wild card team and play Anaheim in the first round.

What that basically boils down to is: If I’m the Ducks, there’s no way in hell I want to pull this card in the first round. At all.

It’ll look like a bit of an upset, but it absolutely won’t be. This team is dynamite and only improving.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise stated.

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