Hopes up in smoke?
History has not been kind to Stanley Cup bridesmaids like the Calgary Flames
It has been more than 15 years since the Calgary Flames have entered a season as a legitimate contender, and four games into their quest they are failing the test badly. As badly as the Anaheim Mighty Ducks did before them, and the Carolina Hurricanes before them.
A sold-out Saddledome love-in — held with the express purpose of reminding the Flames players how good they were 17 months ago when they reached the Stanley Cup finals — is absolutely the last thing this club needs right now. So you can imagine how much patience Flames coach and general manager Darryl Sutter will have with a 19-minute ceremony before tonight’s home opener. It will culminate in the raising of a banner so large that it just might eclipse the one they hung in the fall of 1989.
You know, when Calgary actually won the Cup?
“It’s good for the guys who were on that team,” Sutter said yesterday, his indifference palpable. “Other than that, to be honest, I’m kind of in the moment, not in the last decade. It’s almost irrelevant to me.”
To their credit, nobody around here is still talking openly about what once was. At least no one within ear shot of the boss.
“ The same people who are telling us what we’re doing wrong?” Sutter said. “They’re the same people who were telling us at the start of the season that we were great.”
It is an affliction — the curse of the Cup finalist — to which no NHL team has found the antidote since the 1983 Edmonton Oilers lost in four games to the mighty New York Islanders, then avenged the loss the following spring. So the key to going from bridesmaid to champion must be to have five Hall Of Famers in your lineup, because for so many others, the trip to the Finals has marked the peak, not the path to the top:
Minnesota took two games from Pittsburgh in the 1991 Final, then didn’t return to finish the job until 1999, when the franchise had shifted to Dallas. Chicago in 1992? The Blackhawks are still in recovery mode. Los Angeles in 1993? A fraud in its owner’s image. Vancouver [’94], Florida [’96], Washington [’ 98], Buffalo [’ 99]?
What happens to these teams?
“Long story short?” asked Sandis Ozolinsh, the Mighty Ducks’ Latvian defender who lived the trend himself during the 2003-04 season. “ We got little too loose, expecting the same results with little less work than the year before. You go to the Cup, you get everyone around team patting you on the back. Telling you, ‘ What great guys you are. You’re so awesome!’ But we forgot: we were eighth seed when we get into playoffs.
“ When we finally realized, ‘ Man, it’s getting further away from us?’ — catch up.”
The Flames, of course, were the sixth seed when they entered the playoffs in the spring of 2004, their first post-season appearance in eight seasons. They played a Vancouver team that did not have Todd Bertuzzi, then lost starting goalie Dan Cloutier in Game 3. Calgary needed Game 7 overtime to defeat Johan Hedberg, Alex Auld and the rest of the Canucks, and with that ounce of belief came a ton of success against a tired Detroit club and a group of San Jose Sharks who were as green as Calgary but not as tough, quick or as well coached as the Flames.
Both Jarome Iginla and Miikka Kiprusoff were re-writing the definition of “clutch performer,” despite the fact neither had been through a playoff run like that in their NHL careers.
The city, too, could have been awarded that green hard hat that the Flames made a habit of giving to their game star, with its Red Mile and fanatical support. When Sports Illustrated picked the Flames to win the Stanley Cup this season, it was as if all Calgary had to do was turn the lights back on at the Saddledome and everything would pick up exactly where it left off. it was too late to
“It was two years ago,” said Chris Simon. “ The game’s changed, the team has changed.”
Simon, a key contributor at times during the Flames run, has been benched already during the Flames’ 1- 3 start. Iginla is playing nearly 21 minutes per night thus far, yet has just 11 shots on goal and three points. Kiprusoff has a save percentage of .855. The Flames, who excelled in the clutch-and-grab game of two years ago, are just grasping these days — with this week’s signing of throwback defenceman Bryan Marchment an indication they haven’t quite embraced the new game.
The Flames just returned from a road trip on which they had their lunch handed to them on three of four nights. They are dead last in the NHL in goals allowed, dead last in penalty killing, dead last in the Northwest Division.
And tonight, they
“Could care less about the whole ceremony,” said defenceman Andrew Ference. “It’s really for our whole organization, great for the fans. But as players, we lost. People have been saying, ‘ It must have been awesome!’ Well, it wasn’t. We lost. It wasn’t so awesome. will celebrate.
“We weren’t patting ourselves on the back afterwards, saying, ‘Great job!’ It wasn’t like that. It was what you learned about yourself; what you learned about your teammates. But it wasn’t all a big ray of sunshine. Man, it’s been a long time now.”
Sutter has already taken to benching veteran players. Simon, Jason Wiemer, Matthew Lombardi. Up front, free-agent grabs Tony Amonte and Darren McCarty have been Sutter’s most consistent players, along with steady centre Stéphane Yelle. The best player through four games may well be rookie Dion Phaneuf, which is both good and bad news. The bad news being that Calgary’s real best player, Iginla, has only been average.
“ I believe we have a great team, and that we have the best goaltender in the league. We just have to start playing like it,” said Simon. “Being around as long as I have, one of the things I’ve learned is that you can’t dwell on what happened. You can’t dwell on one game, on the last road trip, and you can’t dwell on two years ago. You have to boil it down to one game. Play one game — win one game.”
That game comes tonight. After the banner raising.