[Sylvanfan]

The Flames went into the season trying very much to be like Carolina. Offensively the two teams are very close in terms of GF, Sh%, shot metrics. Difference is that Carolina is elite for goals against and the Flames are mid pack.

There's likely that hard to quantify human factor of confidence where Flames shooters playing behind so much and with pressure squeeze the sticks and perform below expected, and the defensive gaffes are more impactful coming into play too. Same with goaltending where Markstrom and Vladar think about not giving up that one bad goal so much they always seem to.