The Flames badly need to address goaltending. Fine. Agreed. With a full season of Ramo providing league average goaltending, the Flames would probably be a bubble team rather than in the Auston Matthews sweepstakes.
BUT stop giving Hartley a free pass for our crappy steadily declining special teams! Twentieth place special teams shouldn't satisfy anyone. We have good enough personnel that this should not happen. When it comes to penalty killing, our guys drop back and give the other teams space. That is the Hartley defensive system that allows a great number of shots, a great number of shot blocks and the opportunity for an inordinate number of bad goals against Hiller in particular. It drives me crazy that with guys like Bouma and Jooris and Frolik that we do not have an aggressive powerplay pressuring the points and taking away time and space. No, instead we have Bouma trying to make a splits save at the top of the circle all the time.
I want to see this team progress and improve. Hartley instilled one good thing - a strong work ethic. He can be commended for that but it's not enough to turn the Flames into a contender. We need someone else to take the next step.
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