Quote:
Originally Posted by edslunch
Yes, goal differential can be influenced by blowouts (in both directions), but over time those even out. And the Flames were hanging with the better teams for a long while, but even then their goal differential was the only negative one. For a time they were ahead of the Kings but they were something like -6 while the kings were plus 20 something. How did things turn out?
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Yes everyone saw the team fall apart. But last season, they made it into the playoffs with a roughly similar goal differential. The problem this season was that the goaltending started to look average and the team didn't enough goal support from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th lines for the last half of the season.
The Flames are way too top heavy and rely on the 1st line to win this team games as evidenced by the incredibly number of wins when the 1st line didn't score. Gaudreau's line can't score every game, they're going to get shut down once in a while and when you only get 4 wins when that happens, that's just not good enough.
Monahan and Backlund are a terrific 1-2 punch, but they're not Kopitar and Carter. Gio was unbelievable this season, but Drew Doughty is a perennial Norris candidate. Smith is the best goaltender we've had in a while, but he's no Jonathan Quick. If this team wants to be top heavy, then they better have some of the best key players in their respective positions, but sadly we don't. We also dealt with injuries poorly this season and when multiple key guys went down, the wheat ultimately separated from the chaff.