16 games into the season and we have already had a team meeting and now the coach has called out their level of engagement. How long can we keep reading this same story?
All of us here have watched a lot of hockey. We are a pretty intelligent and engaged hockey community, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We all see it with this team. We see a team with a severe lack of effort, execution, puck pursuit, energy, GAF, whatever you want to call it. We know what a hard working team looks like and this has not been it for a long long time. We see a team that loses 50:50 battles regularly, offers fairly little in physical play, has horrible starts to games, has a goalie consistently bail them out and keep them in games. Changing line combinations is going to do nothing of really any significance. The problems run deep. The culture of this team is rotten. They’re complacent group content on being average and management has rewarded that complacency with giving letters and big contracts to the guys who are at the centre of this lethargic mess of a team. There needs to be a complete and total reset of this team. The core needs to be gutted. All the significant names have to be moved.
Tkachuk came on this team playing like a guy who wanted to compete and win and now after a few seasons the culture of this team has finally sucked him into the black hole of complacency and removed any of his fire that once existed. We can’t let this continue to happen to future players. The culture of hard work, intensity and commitment needs to be established and maintained through all levels of our farm system and into the Flames locker room.
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