When the Calgary Flames swapped their 2017 calendars for fresh 2018s, it’s safe to say things weren’t looking ideal for the Albertan club. Heading into the new year, the team ranked fifth in its division and 11th in the West overall, struggling to string together the consistency needed to hold onto a playoff spot.
Just a couple weeks later, the Flames are sitting pretty in the Pacific Division’s top three, a seven-game win streak in their rearview. While some have looked to head coach Glen Gulutzan’s stick-throwing outburst as the catalyst for Calgary’s turnaround, general manager Brad Treliving pointed to a few astute roster changes as a key contributor to his club’s resurgence.
“I thought there might be a little staleness. We were doing lots of good things but we needed to get maybe just a little bit of a zap,” Treliving told Bob McCown and John Shannon on Sportsnet 590’s Prime Time Sports on Wednesday. “People always think it’s a massive trade or a massive change, but I wanted to get a little more pace and tempo and speed in our lineup, so we tweaked a couple things.
“We added some depth on our blue line and in the organization by adding Dalton Prout … We brought up some guys from the minors. We had Andrew Mangiapane added to our team from Stockton, (and) Marek Hrivik. So sometimes it’s tweaks around the edges that gets people’s attention a little bit.”
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Adding more youth to the roster has had an undeniable effect on the Flames’ effectiveness, no more so than in regards to young pivot Mark Jankowski. A long-term project for the team that began at the 2012 NHL Draft, the 23-year-old looks to have finally found his fit in the big leagues.
“Mark Jankowski is an NHL player. We really felt that through training camp,” Treliving said. “He’s had an impact on our team. He’s still a young player — he’s still going to be growing, but he’s a big, six-foot-four, 200-plus-pound centre-iceman with reach and hockey sense and competitiveness.”
While Jankowski has emerged from the AHL as a regular depth contributor for Calgary, one of the club’s more high-profile 2017-18 additions, defender Travis Hamonic, has had a more tumultuous adjustment period in his new threads.
The Flames brass is pleased with how the former New York Islander has meshed with Calgary’s defensive corps though, said Treliving, acknowledging that it took time for Hamonic to settle in with his new blue-line partner T.J. Brodie.
Part of the issue is simply how drastically the defence position has changed in the NHL, according to the Flames GM.
“It’s a difficult position to play. Outside of goaltending, to be perfectly honest with you, I think it’s the position that’s evolved the most in the last number of years,” Treliving said of NHL blueliners. “When we all talk about this new game and the speed of it, I think the people that have been affected the most are defencemen. It’s hard to be the throwback, pin-and-hold guys. The rules on how you defend — the hooking, the holding, using your stick to knock guys down — it’s been taken out of it. It’s hard.
“When you look at it, they’re spending most of their time skating backwards in a game that’s going a million miles an hour. And just the evolution of how teams defend now — it’s about getting the puck up the ice and out of your end as quick as you can … so I think we’ve found a real shift in how you find these players (and) what’s important in terms of the attributes of defencemen.”
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