TIGHT TIMELINE
Playoff shot on the line
Particularly unhappy with the intensity shown by his team during a Monday morning drill, Glen Gulutzan stopped practice for a pointed sermon of sorts.
With stick firmly in hand, he offered up a few choice words for the troops before punctuating the talk with a simple question heard halfway up the stands.
“How are we going to start tomorrow?”
Add that to the long list of questions in Calgary where the coach is painfully short of answers these days.
Short on patience, too. Take a simple question about the team’s poor start Sunday, which saw the lads down 2-0 to the New York Islanders less than three minutes into a game of tremendous magnitude. When a reporter reiterated Mike Smith’s concerns about the team’s mental shortcomings prompting a bad start, the typically cordial Gulutzan took exception.
He’s been doing that a lot more lately.
“You guys are killing me with these questions because if the (Islanders) shot doesn’t go in and Chucky (Matthew Tkachuk) scores, we’re talking about a great start, so you guys are beating a dead horse over and over here for me,” said Gulutzan, who said there were no Flames turnovers the first five minutes.
“Am I going to write a paragraph on turnovers for the first two goals? It would be a useless endeavour.”
Gulutzan looks tired, and certainly seems to be tired of the scrutiny.
Strange to see him become increasingly confrontational given he’s intelligent enough to know such scrutiny comes with the territory in a Canadian market where his team is underachieving.
There have certainly been plenty of critics suggesting Gulutzan should take the fall if the Flames miss the playoffs.
He’s keenly aware of that possibility and is likely frustrated at being caught in a position he never fathomed he’d be in with this talented group.
One month ago, before Smith was injured, the team seemed to be in a good spot. However, Smith’s backups couldn’t hold the fort, dropping the Flames outside a playoff spot.
With a dozen games left in a playoff dogfight that has the Flames spotting every team around them a game or two, Gulutzan’s gang is still plagued by a few puzzling pitfalls: they can’t seem to win at home, their intensity doesn’t seem to match the situation they’re in and their goaltending isn’t good enough.
Faulting Smith for the four goals he let in the 5-2 loss Sunday would be pushing it, save for the juicy rebound he coughed up early in the fourth to let Anders Lee put the Isles up 4-1.
In his first start since going down with a lower body injury, he was victimized by two bad bounces early on and got better as the game progressed. So did the team, but it was too late, as Chris Gibson channelled his inner Lundqvist to stop 50 shots.
“You put up 94 attempts, I don’t know how much more direct you can get,” said Gulutzan, again challenging a questioner who found fault in a loss to a nonplayoff team that had lost eight straight coming into the night.
“Show me the teams that have put up those attempts back to back at home. We’ve just got to have a different mindset in the fact that how we’re perceiving our games at home and how we can get over that hump.” Sure do.
Combine the Flames’ 14-16-4 home record with the fact Tuesday’s visitors, the Edmonton Oilers, have beaten their rivals seven straight times and the stage is set for a humiliating kick to the groin should the Flames lose again.
After all, it would all but end the Flames’ playoff hopes.
“Like I said to our guys, it doesn’t matter who we are playing, we just have to get a hard, battle mindset,” said Gulutzan, whose team has one regulation win in its last 11 Dome dates.
“We just have to have a different mindset. We need a little more of that net presence, that grind and that desperation early.”
And they may need to do it without Matthew Tkachuk, who left Sunday’s game with five minutes left after smoking his head on the boards thanks to a backwards fall over Mathew Barzal.
Mikael Backlund and Sean Monahan also missed practice Monday for “maintenance” and all three will have their statuses updated Tuesday morning.
Smith will be back in net with en eye on getting one of the eight or nine wins the club will need in the final dozen games to have a chance at making the post-season.
Otherwise, even more questions will be asked, giving the coach even more opportunities to snap back.