For the second year in a row the Calgary Flames have turned a season-opening face plant into a playoff perch.
Stumbling out of the gate both seasons with records that should have ended their playoff hopes, the team has rebounded once again with an impressive run that has them back in the top eight.
They’ve somehow earned another Mulligan.
This year’s second chance appears much more promising than the one they squashed last January as the team returned from Phoenix early Friday morning sitting tied with Edmonton for tops in the Pacific Division.
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They are a shocking third in the West, thanks to a five-game winning streak that has seen everything that went wrong the first month go right of late.
Actually, the biggest thanks go to Chad Johnson who is now 12-4-1 with a 1.98 GAA.
The unlikely hometown hero is drawing comparisons to the organization’s last goaltending saviour, Miikka Kiprusoff, who also emerged from the shadows to take over the starting job.
Goaltending – meaning Johnson – has been the backbone of the team’s climb back to respectability, which is stunning given how horrific it was all last season and the early part of this campaign when Brian Elliott failed to live up to expectations.
Since starting the season with three regulation wins in their first 16 games, the Flames essentially switched to Johnson and have gone 10-3-1 as part of a run that has also seem them pile up a league-leading nine road wins.
The man with the best seat in the house during the Flames run has been season-opening starting goalie Elliott who has been stapled to the bench with a 3-9-1 record and 3.31 GAA that spoke to just how horrific he and the Flames were to open the season.
Elliott was one of the team’s five core players who all struggled out of the starting blocks trying to implement Glen Gulutzan’s new system. Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan both seemed to feel the effects of missing training camp and captain Mark Giordano and T.J. Brodie were nowhere near the impact players that made them one of the league’s most prolific duos last season.
All that has turned, except for Elliott who has been rendered inconsequential for now, thanks to Johnson.
It wasn’t long ago people were calling for the coach’s head, leading up to a 1-0 win in Minnesota Nov. 15 that stopped a four-game losing skid and turned the season around. Johnson made 27 saves that night to get the team four games below .500.
Johnny Gaudreau scored the only goal, marking his only significant contribution to the team to that point.
He left that game with a broken finger that required surgery and cost him 10 games. The team rallied around his absence, focused on tightening up defensively and has made Gulutzan look like a genius. Since returning, Gaudreau has been brilliant, scoring on his first shift back, en route to compiling six points in three games.
It’s symbolic of the recent return to normalcy by the team’s core, which includes seeing Sean Monahan bounce back from a puzzling start to post a six-game scoring streak.
In a city where Flames tickets have become a tough sell due to the economy and the slow start, interest was back on the rise after the team hit .500 and climbed into a wild card spot with an 8-3 thumping of the Ducks.
It officially dug the Flames out of their early hole, earning them the do-over they’ve been building on ever since.
Yes, the Flames are the first team to play 30 games, they are only two games above .500, their goal differential is minus-9 and they still sport two of the NHL’s worst special teams units.
However, they finally feel good about themselves, they seem to have figured out how they need to play and they have a three-game home stand starting Saturday that can be used to build further momentum.
“We’ve got traction now,” said Gulutzan of his team’s recent surge, which also includes a 27th-ranked powerplay that escaped the NHL’s basement with goals in four straight games.
“We’ve got to stay consistent. I’ve said this before, ‘You are what you repeatedly do.’ We have to continue night-in-and-night-out to play a certain way and it gives us a chance to get points. There’s no breathing, by any stretch of the imagination. We dug ourselves a hole at the beginning of the season, we’re getting out of it now, and we have to keep pushing.”
Because no one gets two Mulligans in a round.
