Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Flames were top 5 worst team in the league last year. By all accounts if you look at the standings, stats, etc, etc....they sucked.
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This is something I have trouble wrapping my head around. Yes, they were a 27th-place team. But they weren't actually quite as bad as that sounds. Look at the standings, and you will see that they were closer to 22nd (Winnipeg, 84 pts.) than to 28th (Edmonton, 67). They were extremely lucky to have a couple of bad teams pass them in the closing days of the season and finish with the opportunity to draft one of last summer's Big Four.
Basically, the Flames got a player who was mentioned in the mix to go first overall, and they got him after a season in which they finished 25 points ahead of last place. Saying that they finished 27th is factually correct, but it tells less than half the story. This is a bad team, but not an awful one, and it may be easier to turn it around than most people suspect.
Add Gaudreau, Bennett, and another good scorer at forward (Ferland? Poirier?), and a couple of top-four defencemen (who are probably not in the system right now, I admit); shove everybody else down the depth chart, and you begin to have what looks like a pretty decent team. There will still be plenty of work to be done at that point, but this is not a tire fire.