FLAMES HEAD BACK TO CAMP
Team seeks chemistry in tune-up
The understandable temptation will be to draw conclusions from the first Calgary Flames practice of training camp.
Fans and media have been waiting months to see how the 2021 Flames might shake up their line combinations.
Will the team split up Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan? Might Elias Lindholm move to centre? Will the Flames stick with a second line of Andrew Mangiapane, Mikael Backlund and Matthew Tkachuk?
They're all legitimate questions — and there's many more, too — but they're not going to get answered on Day 1 of training camp. They might not be answered by the time the regular season gets underway, either.
The message from Flames management Sunday was pretty clear: They're going to play around with some different combinations, but it's best not to overreact.
“We'll go on the ice tomorrow and the big story will be who is playing with who, and I caution everybody that it's Day 1. It might be different in Day 2, it could be different in Day 3,” said Flames GM Brad Treliving. “I know we'll tweet out `Here's what's going on' but it's not gospel. I think what we'll use, whether it be through training camp or even the beginning of the year, we've got some good players and we may experiment with some different things.”
The Flames will be dividing the players they're bringing into camp into two groups, Team Iginla and Team Mcdonald, and will be playing two intrasquad games as they prepare for the regular season.
Within those groups, Ward seems committed to mixing and matching players to see where there's chemistry and what options he might have in a season where the Flames will be playing only Canadian teams and the 56-game schedule will come fast and furious.
It's entirely possible that the Gaudreau-monahan-lindholm line will remain just the way it was last season and that the Tkachuk-backlund-mangiapane trio will be untouched when games get going, as well.
But Ward showed he was willing to tinker when he took over the Flames' head coaching job last season, and he believes it's essential to at least test the waters and see if there might be some hidden magic in different combinations.
“There's nothing written in stone,” Ward said. “I think we do ourselves a disservice if we don't take a look, potentially, at what some new people may inject with some of the people we have.
“We know what the lineup was like that we ended the year with and we're comfortable with that lineup, but I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if we don't take the opportunity to see if we have a better potential lineup than the one we ended with.”
The Flames are set to start camp with 41 players in attendance. Oliver Kylington will arrive late because of Visa issues while Canadian forwards Jakob Pelletier and Connor Zary and American goaltender Dustin
Wolf won't get to Calgary until their journeys at the IIHF World Junior Championship are over.
With 24 forwards and 12 defencemen set to attend training camp, there's certainly no shortage of potential line combinations for Ward and his coaching staff to try out. They'll be able to carry a six-player taxi squad into the season, too, so there are opportunities for guys who might not normally have a realistic shot of sticking around Calgary when the regular season action starts.
And, as Ward explained, trying out different combinations of players may wind up being crucial to the Flames' success in this shortened season. There's less time than ever to get over a slow start, so the Flames want their best team ready on Day 1, but they also need to be flexible in the face of what's sure to be a challenging schedule.
The more they know about the various combinations they've got at their disposal, the better. For the most part, the Flames know what they have when their big names on the top two lines are skating as a unit, so using training camp to look at other options only makes sense.
Again, that means that what we see on Day 1 may not reveal all that much about the way the Flames will line up when the season gets rolling.
“We've got some good new players who have come into our team and we've gotta now take a look at where they may fit best within the team now. For us, we could be juggling people on a daily basis just to get a feel for that,” Ward said.
“Our job at the end of training camp is to understand and be comfortable with what our best lineup is going to look like going into Winnipeg (for the season opener on Jan. 14), so any juggling we do in the days leading up to that is going to be beneficial for us.”