[Badgers Nose]

Originally Posted by GranteedEV

Hartley pretty much gets a mulligan for the lockout year. No training camp, completely different style from Brent, and starting goaltender hurt all year.

which leaves us with three seasons to evaluate.

The Flames were expected to be the worst team in the NHL in 2013-14 with their torn down roster and the employment of guys like Chris Butler and David Jones it was sipposed to be a crap year. Giordano also had an injury. And Hartley had some issues with his usage of Backlund early on. But most would agree that that was when this team's hopes started to turn around as they starting playing a very successful and consistent brand in the second half of the season. It was the least painful 26th place season ever.

The next year the team was probably the mentally toughest team in the NHL. People talk about comebacks but that team was excellent at holding on to leads and even the loss of Mark Giordano didn't phase them. They went into some huge do or die games against Dallas, Colorado, and Los Angeles and simply buried their playoff hopes with their reslience and teamwork. Descriptions of how that team included buzz words like hard-working, hard-skating. Their motto was "Never Quit". They trailed against Vancouver by multiple goals in game 6, had to make a goalie change and all Ramo did was allow a goal almodt immediately... so they went and won that game anyways out of sheer determination. They were completely out.atched by Anaheim from a roster perspective and were expected to get swept. Well they won game 3, had an unlikely lead in game 4 that was pissed away by one an individual player (Colborne) meltdown, and they lost an overtime game to finally be eliminated. The team was the gold dtandard for mental toughness.

The next season they added a new player and there were issues with how they defended. Brodie had missed a handful of games and Hiller wasn't tracking the puck through traffic at all. They were buried early and looked dead in the water, but started to outscore their problems and found themselves right back in a playoff spot in December. Then Ramo got hurt in January and they had a huge road trip in which Hiller was a sieve against bottom feeding teams and they shut it down. They traded away their third leading point producer and their third leading TOI defenseman for picks. But they never fell apart, and finished the season as strongly as a team rolling top line winger Hunter Shinkaruk and top 4 defenseman Jyrki Jokipakka could have. Their reward was Matthew Tkachuk, who would instantly be our second best offensive forward as well as a key defensive piece.

And then Gulutzan came in. Not everything under Gulutzan has been mentally weak. The ten game win streak last year, the seven game win streak this year. This core is still resilient. But they lack the confidence in their ability to do it consistently, and that comes down to Gulutzan's systems and player usage, not mental weakness. I believe in this core. They need better periphery players (like Andersson instead of Stone and Mangiapane instead of every bottom six winger) and a style better suited to using this team's strengths towards generating offense when the goalie isn't posting a .944 road SV%.

I'm out of thanks, so Thank You!