A mixture of a season long lack of finish coupled with a pretty porous defense led to a 4-1 loss in Vancouver despite a hard working effort by the Flames.
Calgary had 40 shots on goal and never gave up, but just don’t have the finishers up front or the defenders on the backend to play up and down hockey with good hockey teams.
The loss locks the Flames into either the 8th or 9th draft position; which will be solved, of course on Thursday night.
Entertaining night for a team well out of it.
Nazem Kadri with three points, Andrei Kuzmenko with two more, goals from two rookies in Matt Coronato and Connor Zary and a win from Dustin Wolf in a crazy 6-5 win over the Coyotes on Sunday night.
Tank fans will be stressed with the Flames potentially falling to 9th overall in the draft, but honestly if you were told in November that the Flames would move Lindholm, Hanifin, Tanev and Zadorov for futures and finish in the bottom ten for draft picks I think you’d be happy.
Season winds down with a game in Vancouver on Tuesday and then a game back at home with San Jose on Thursday.
This Andrei Kuzmenko thing is becoming more and more of a story.
The player scores a hat trick tonight in the Flames 6-3 win over the Ducks in Anaheim, giving him 14 points in the last 7 games, and a 20+ goal season after a terrible start in Vancouver.
The player seems to be pretty happy, as demonstrated in his jacked interview after the game.
Quite the trade for the Flames with the Flames adding an impact scoring forward, Hunter Brzustewicz, and a 1st round pick in a couple of months (plus other pieces).
The Flames through this clearly-won’t-make-the-playoffs section of their season have been gamers every night.
They don’t throw in the towel.
They don’t give up.
Tonight they were playing an LA Kings team that was hurting from a loss, and looking to clinch a playoff spot, and with that the game was never really in doubt with the LA building a 3-0 lead and cruising to a 4-1 victory.
Jonathan Huberdeau gets a third period goal to break up the shut out, but overall it was just another night on the schedule.
Interesting game between two teams literally going nowhere.
The Flames have been bad in the last two months of the season, but the Sharks are proof positive that there is a lot of real estate remaining in the South direction. Yikes.
Calgary with a slow start but then they get going, erasing a 2-0 San Jose lead, and winning it in overtime on an Andrei Kuzmenko powerplay goal.
Dustin Wolf picks up the win in his hometown in a special night.
