[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by transplant99

I love your enthusiasm and whatnot for this club, but I think you are lying to yourself if you think things are OK.

PP and PK are bottom 7 in the league....earlier this season they were top 10. How is that things trending in the right way?

I agreed with you that the power play is an issue, but the penalty kill has been 3/3 in their past two games. The best news in this is that the Flames have really dramatically cut down the number of penalties they were taking in the early part of the year.

Sorry Im not buying the old "all will be fine" mantra yet, as there has been no consistency from this club all season.

There are pretty good reasons to think that the issues with the team will correct themselves in due course, similar to how the Flames effectively improved their defence and penchant for penalties from the first several games of the season.

Honestly they could have lost to the Caps and should have lost last night. That game is likely 3 or 4 nothing after the 1st if Smith isn't channeling his inner Johnny Bower.

And if the Flames had scored on three posts that they hit in the Washington game, they would have blown out the Capitals. It goes both ways most of the time. Yes, they have won some games that they probably should have lost (the LA game is one), but the Flames have also lost games that they by rights should have won this year, such as against Minnesota where they were easily the better team.

Those kind of efforts are not what a contending team comes up with when facing a team on the 2nd of back to back nights whilst playing their backups.

It has been explained to you now numerous times precisely why the first period was so lopsided, and thus why the Flames allowed so many first period shots—one team was dialed in while the other was struggling to find their legs after several days off. This kind of thing happens pretty frequently, even to the best NHL teams.

But what I have a problem with is your utter refusal to acknowledge what happened after period 1 last night. You continue to rail on about how bad the Flames played, but that completely ignores the fact that they matched the Penguins—and by some accounts were actually better than them—through the balance of the game. No, it was not a 60 minute effort like against the Capitals, but the Flames deserve a hell of a lot more credit than you seem willing to concede for turning that game around last night.

Simply not good enough and certainly not serious contender type of play and when combined with the laissez faire attitude they have demonstrated from one game to the next, a very real issue.

It is probably not good enough just yet, but again, there are valid explanations for that and good reason to expect that they will continue to improve through the season.

Again, I concede that there are still issues, but you also need to give the team some credit for their play of late, which on the whole has actually been quite good. I missed the entire first period in last night's game, but despite the low score was thoroughly entertained by what I saw from both teams in periods 2 and 3. If the Flames can play like that most nights they are going to win a bunch of games.