Team building up strength for stretch run
With captain Giordano expected back soon, the team is firing up for the stretch run
The captain will be back soon.
And Mark Giordano’s return to game action, whether that comes Thursday in Music City or waits until this weekend in the Sunshine State, will undoubtedly be big news for the Calgary Flames.
He is, after all, their emotional engine, their best blueliner, their leading minute-muncher and a key piece on both sides of special teams.
Just as significant, maybe even more so, for the Flames is it seems that some of their other difference-making dudes are already back.
Back, that is, to looking like their old selves.
Johnny Gaudreau’s season-long stat line isn’t going to stack up to his career-best campaign of a year ago, but the superstar left-winger has been a point-per-game guy since the calendar flipped to 2020. That’s more like it.
His sidekick, Sean Monahan, is once again reminding everyone of his reputation as a clutch shooter. He tallied twice to spur his squad to Tuesday’s 5-2 statement win over the league-leading Boston Bruins, ending Tuukka Rask’s incredible streak of homeice success, and now has four goals in a four-game stretch.
And second-line/shutdown centre Mikael Backlund, who also underachieved in the early stages of the season but didn’t catch too much flak because of all the focus on Johnny and Monny, has been Calgary’s best-of-bunch since the all-star break.
The way No. 11 responded after Tuesday’s stare-down with Bruins lamplighter/pot-stirrer Brad Marchand, deadline-day pickup Erik Gustafsson will certainly know not to swipe Backlund’s seat if there’s only room for four in an Uber. (After Monday’s acquisition of Gustafsson, the Flames’ contingent of Swedes is now Uberxl-sized.)
Backlund sealed the victory in Beantown with an end-to-end rush, then made absolutely sure of it with an empty-netter on that same shift. He’s notched eight markers, more than half of his winter total, in the past eight dates.
“Johnny has been obviously putting points up for a while now,” Flames interim coach Geoff Ward said after Tuesday’s triumph. “I think he has 19 points in his last 19 games, so he’s not coming around — he’s been scoring. The other two guys, the fact that they’re putting pucks in the back of the net, that will feed their confidence. Backs will tell you he’s always been a second-half scorer, and we’re starting to see some of that. And I really liked his response — I thought he competed hard. He came off the exchange with Marchand and ended up scoring a couple of goals. So I thought for him, that was huge.
“And when Monny is shooting the puck, he’s at his best. He was a shot-first guy (Tuesday) instead of looking for that extra pass, and it ends up in a couple of goals.
For us, hopefully those guys build some momentum off it. And they should because the way that they scored, I think it’s important in terms of the way that they need to play.”
That hat trick of forwards will be crucial to the Flames’ push to not only punch a playoff ticket, but perhaps seize homeice advantage in a jam-packed Pacific Division, a quest that continues with Thursday’s clash against the Nashville Predators at Bridgestone Arena (6 p.m.
MT, Sportsnet West/sportsnet 960 The Fan). The Flames and Predators are parked in the two wild-card slots in the Western Conference standings.
Gaudreau’s offensive drop-off has been a hot topic since the fall, but nobody should be complaining about his recent clip.
He has a team-leading 22 points in as many games since New Year’s Day, has been blanked just twice in the past dozen outings, and his setup on Monahan’s first strike in Boston was vintage No. 13. Gaudreau had everybody guessing with a bit of shake and bake, drawing a pair of defenders and then spying his BFF in the spot that he’d just softened.
Monahan’s one-timer wasn’t a howitzer, but he found daylight between Rask’s blocker and the post and made a bit of history in the process, becoming the first corner-picker in Flames’ franchise history to score 20 goals in his first seven campaigns in the bigs. He buried his 21st of this season just 72 seconds later on a nifty redirect on the man-advantage.
Both great passes, sure, but the Flames rely on Monahan to be a guy who makes the most of those Grade A chances and that’s exactly what No. 23 did in Boston.
“I mean, it’s nice,” Monahan shrugged when asked post-game about extending his string of 20-goal seasons. “But at the end of the day, I want to just be in the playoffs. It’s team-first.”
A playoff invite seems a lot more realistic with Gaudreau, Monahan and Backlund looking like their old selves and Matthew Tkachuk continuing to grow into a team-on-his-shoulders type.
And don’t forget, they’re about to welcome back another biggie.
Giordano has missed 10 in a row since being hobbled by a hamstring injury, but he’s so close that he was officially a game-time decision against the Bruins.
The Flames were off Wednesday, so there was no further update, but it’s certainly possible the 36-year-old is back on the top defence pair against the Predators.
“I think until he feels like he’s really, really confident in it, there’s no sense putting him on the ice,” Ward said after Tuesday’s win in his old stomping grounds at TD Garden. “If this was a playoff series, it might be different. But we don’t want to put him in a situation where he goes out there, he’s not 100 per cent confident in what’s going on and then something else happens and we lose him for a longer period of time.
“So we’re going to take our time with it. We’re going to make sure he feels real, real good about it.”
The Flames so far are 6-4 without their captain. They can feel relatively good about that, especially since that includes five wins on the road.
What they should be most encouraged about, however, is that some of their go-to guys have really raised their games of late.
“Anytime you have guys out of your lineup, it gives you opportunity to develop depth,” Ward said when asked what he’s learned about his group since No. 5 was shelved. “I think we reinforced to ourselves that we have depth in our lineup. I think other guys, in his absence, really stepped up and showed that we have a good leadership group in our room in terms of how we were preparing to play and how the guys got along without him.
“And I think it said something about the competitive juice of our team — we weren’t feeling sorry for ourselves and we weren’t worrying about what wasn’t there. The guys looked at it as an opportunity to come together, understanding there was a hole in our lineup and what we needed to do to be successful without him in it, and then just getting to work and doing what we needed to do as a group in order to have success when he was out.
“I think they responded the right way to it. The interesting thing now is when you get a big piece back, what tends to happen sometimes is that guys stop playing and sort of relax — ‘OK, we’ve got this guy back now, so now we’re OK.’ That can’t be the case for us. When Gio comes back in, we have to maintain exactly what we were doing so that it’s easy for him to immerse himself back in and he doesn’t feel like he has to do more than what he should be doing.”