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@RickTulsie · 8h #yyc #Flames fans. I waited awhile to #Tweet this. It’s been a tough one for me. Saying goodbye to a #saddledome work #friend. We have lost some BIG name players. You all know who, & recently our GM. The one person I have worked with & will miss the most of all is. 1OF2 Rick Tulsie @RickTulsie 2/2 Scott Vickers, is a #friend that has been Harvey the Hound for 20 seasons! WOW. Scott is actually the nephew of Grant Kelba, who created Harvey the Hound when the Flames came to Calgary in 1980. On the last reg. #Flames game we did a final farewell on #NHL ice for #family. 12:18 PM · Apr 23, 2023 · 4,436 Views

Tonight was a weird game so far. Kings taking it to the Oilers and Korpi standing strong. A PP goal on a hook or whatever you get called on for touching McD. An even strength goal after the D is trip to set up the play. A legal hit on Draisaitl called for some weird reason. Now 3-3 with Campbell sporting a shutout.

I'm not sure what you mean "the new software only..." . BTW, I am angry about the coaching. PP points there. No changes to strategy. Goalies. Can't blame the GAA and SA% on coaches, but what changes happened as a result of the EDM series? As well, who's brilliant ideas were used when evaluating who should get the start? There were times that one was playing good and got sat. Using Markstrom in the 1st of a B2B and the backup wins the 2nd game. The odd time they got it right. Lines. I don't think you can fault the players for not performing in the wrong position. Team. I don't think you can fault Lucic for being useless.

He was relegated to the press pound eating kibbles. Dino the Dinosaur was going to take his place.

For one thing, the collective sigh for having two guys that play one style of hockey that does not win games would be deafening. For another the draft pick would never get a chance to play in the NHL under Sutter. Back to junior kid. FOr two years. For that matter, do you want to play a prospects with two grinders with limited skill?

End of an era for the man inside the suit.

Are we reallyt blaming the owners except for not allowing a mini rebuild? They signed off on a trade of Tkachuk for very high value targeys that were in the window of their careers (much like Gaudreau was). Many didn't agree with it and perhaps the owners are th ones that were too short sighted to deal with CAR's offer. IT was a radical shift, but we end up with possibly just one player back. So, results. Largely the same team. A better D as a replacement for missing Kylington. A top 6 C to add to the mix. A top rated LW. First win streak to start the season in like forever, and it's time to bag skate the team and change the mindset. Huberdeau has visions of playing a top 6 role with our best C and probably our best finisher remaining. That lasts 6 games or so. Injury and replace him on the top line with Ruzicka. Magic, but need to fix that player. Drop him down the lineup until he loses the magic. Then scratch for the rest of the year. Play an inept 4th line like they are an energy line. Roll 4. Matchups are not important. Chemistry is not important, just play where your performance defines you. Only in the top 6 perhaps. Define a young set of D as not being worth playing or keeping. Trash young prospects because of size or impact playing a couple of games of limited minutes. Play the starter only, when his performance at the end of the season suggests he's only playing average. Let another goalie go cold to the point that his streak of games with points ends, then sit him again. Blame the coach is wrong because we have fired a bunch of them? Rooney may not have been a good target for BT, but that was well before the Tkachuk trade. Trading Monahan to sign Kadri may be horrible asset management (1st rounder) but he was broken for years. If there was an option of keeping Monahan and flipping him at TDL, I would have been all ears. Hard to sell any teams on Lucic. There were several UFA's that I was interested in and several trades that came out of nowhere, but the die was cast with the coach. We couldn't exactly get quality when all we had to trade was picks and prospects. At least while we were trying to maintain the mantra of going for it. Fire the whole lot of them. Not one of them has had success this year in their respective areas. Find a GM that will fill the coaching staff with a winning formula and find the players to fit that. Staying with the same coaches likely means we have to trade 30% of the players.

I hate making predictions. LA plays such a good game at limiting the chances. They haven't even had great offense yet and only lost one game. They have scored 5v5, but the so-called highest scoring team can't. The only reason the games have been that close is PP's. LA has their share of PPG, but EDM has more. If LA starts taking over games, then the Oilers are sunk. They don't have anything to counter with and no strong goaltending. Markstrom level goalie and Vladar level backup. And their backup is the starter.

Was it modern though?

City of Excuses. Draisaitl complaining about standard of penalties. Connor saying he's a better judge of high sticks from 200 feet away. Coach that blames the reffing and says Connor was 3 feet away. Best player on the planet can't even score a 5v5 goal. And he was out there for the losing goal. Stop playing because you blew the whistle you carry around?

I think we loved the team more than we loved Sutter. Gaudreau turning people inside out. Tk-douche-chuk angering everyone he played against. Money-hands before they broke him. If you look at Sutter's first season, he ended the career of Bennett. 2nd season, he turned Jarnkrok into a nothing. Outcoached by the Oilers rookie coach in the playoffs. Whether Labarbera had a negative impact on our goalies or Sigalet's plan did it. Or that they were never as goos as the defense that played in front. Hard to tell, since we lost two of the guys from their best years. Markstrom's glove was useless against the Oilers, but looked awesome against the Stars. I just hope they evaluate the entire coaching staff. We had more than one that seemed to be a flop.

What was Nurse doing during the OT goal? Why did Bouchard manage to take a penalty to allow the tying goal? And Deharnais the OT penalty that lost game 1. I agree that Skinner is bad. They can't go back to Soup now though. But with regards to D, the only ones that understand defense is Ekholm and Ceci. Kulak isn't bad, but he's on what, the 3rd pair with another offensive guy?

I don't really care at this point. I doubt many felt the way you did and certainly not after his meh results. It's not like his career was on an upward trajectory. His stats were trending downward in the HAL and same in the NHL with his limited starts. Worth a first? Maybe before he played a NHL game. I think he may have been a failure of the coaching staff. Took the raw skills and turned him into crap. Maybe the strike year interrupted his development. He was better after two years there, but doesn't really prove much.

The Oilers goaltending and defense is already showing strains. In the first two games the Oilers had 2 goal leads.

I would love to hear Kelly Hrudey try to manage to get one of them right.

I never felt that way about Ortio. At 22, he managed to have one good year in the AHL The following year back to average. I don't see any time where he was worth anything in a trade. Maybe to a team wanting to risk a decent pick for a possible future NHL goalie.

Regardless of whether McD was 3 or 20 feet away (he was 20, saw the pic), it doesn't change the fact that players try to influence the call on the icee all the time. They call icings, penalties and no goals. I don't have a dog in the fight, even if I dispise the Oilers. I jest felt there was no proof to call it back. The homer Debrusk didn't change my opinion of what I saw.

The funny thing is the coach said the the best player in the world saw a high stick touch. The position of McD at the time was 20 feet away.

That one 5 second video showed IMHO a fluttering puck that didn't stop fluttering after the stick came close to it. The arc of the puck didn't change whatsoever. They spent a lot of time (8 minutes?) looking for the touch and didn't see it. Had the puck movement changed, there might be a better argument for overturning the goal.

Well a smart GM would recognize this history and do everything he could to force it down Sutter's throat. It's a cap necessity for one thing but also a smart decision seeing the trend of the coach. I don't think Sutter has the right ideas about what a team needs, so GM not in the cards. I even question if he has what it takes to build a team with what he has. He was genious when Johnny and Matty were here, but without them nothing seemed to work. He was given way more than he was able to properly use. Back in 2004, he had a young superstar and a stud goalie. But decisions after that year....who made them? GM or coach telling the GM. The year with no games messed up things a bit.

Impressive indentation. The big drawback to having a guy like Wolf during a rebuild is that he would win. Proven NHL goalies that are young have a massive return in trade. Prospects without that go for far less. What's the most massive goalie trade you have seen for a NHL backup looking really good?

I'm not going to MOD this, just let the posters decide if they want to continue this narrow discussion.

That last angle showed no touch at all. You would think they could do like a virtual shift of the angle to show from the top. It's close but the stick avoids contact. The player isn't stupid, he's not going to tap it. Oh, but Connor called it. Give me a break. Like he's never said anything that wasn't true. He wanted a stopage and the faceoff outside the zone. The linesmen watch the puck a lot closer and they didn't see it. The NHL has 10x better views of the play and they didn't see it. It's one thing to rule a kicking motion, that's a judgement call. It's different with a puck hitting the stick where all they need to see is one view that shows a touch.

I appreciate the opinion, but do we need a separate thread to discuss how you feel the coach is great, but the players and the GM suck? There are enough threads for that. BY no means does that mean you should not post, just keep in mind that people tend to post in the threads with the most discussion.

Rhett does a good job with his analysis of the team's play, but sometimes the rant gets a little loud. Maybe not him as much as Boomer and Wills and Steinberg. Those last two guys sound so much like mouthpieces for whatever the team is selling.