[News] Practice Notes - 11/13

[Flames Draft Watcher]

Originally Posted by The Boy Wonder

I don’t think smith is the best bet.

He has been awful for ~10 calendar months now... to me that points to a trend not a “he can shake it off”

If you look at his full history he hasn’t won in the playoffs since 2012 which is a long time ago. Smith sucks and it’s ridiculous that he has more leash than seemingly any other sub .890 goalie in the league.

LOL @ counting his performance in terms of calendar months when he doesn't play hockey all summer. So instead of 10 months you actually mean 4 months? Exaggerate much? You can often tell how strong an argument is by how much people exaggerate. Smith came back from injury when? March? So March, half of April, Oct, half of Nov. Yep that's apparently 10 months to some people. LOL!

And then you do the same ridiculousness with your playoff analysis when you fully know that he played for one of the worst teams in the league in ARI. Evaluating a player's playoff performance while playing for a non-playoff team is as you should know quite ridiculous.

I mean we've seen Smith struggle a bit. But your posts on the subject are laughable when you exaggerate the way you do. If you have a solid argument you don't need to exaggerate everything.

[GioforPM]

Originally Posted by Fan in Exile

No, not never start Smith again but he absolutely should not continue to be treated as the unquestioned #1 with priority in starts and big games. And if you're pretending that isn't still happening, I'm not going to bother arguing it.

He's had more starts, yup. He's had tougher opponents. I guess. That latter point isn't exactly a point in Rittich's favour. But they definitely seem to be transitioning to a more equal workload between the two.

Are you saying Montreal is a big game? Will you say the same if Rittich gets HNIC against the Oilers?

[Strange Brew]

Originally Posted by Bingo

The starter (Turek) was hurt though.

They didn't have the option of testing the new guy while keeping the number one sharp.

Rittich did a face plant last year as the number one, he may do that again. Until proven otherwise Smith is the most likely bet to be the team's most dependable path to adequate goaltending based on his career and history.

If he continues to sputter though, I think you'll see Rittich get more and more rope to see if he hangs himself. If he doesn't a star is born!

Exactly. At this point in the season, giving Smith a few more games to find his form doesn't preclude Rittich from taking this team on a run through the playoffs.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Snuffleupagus

It's been over a year since he put up back to back good starts

No it hasn’t.

I mean, it’s been 10 months, so that’s not a whole lot better, but... for the sake of accuracy I guess.

[GioforPM]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

No it hasn’t.

I mean, it’s been 10 months, so that’s not a whole lot better, but... for the sake of accuracy I guess.

10 months with a fairly huge break in between.

If I want to be more positive I'd say he put up a very good starting assignment last game and played pretty well in the second half of the game before (after crapping the bed in the beginning). So a small trend I guess.

[GioforPM]

So much talk about Smith and Bennett, with a little Neal thrown in that no one noticed that Peters is putting the kids back together on the third pairing. This makes me happy. Stone wasn't bad last game, but he's worse at the transition game than either guy, and they seem to be developing chemistry which I want to continue. Pretty sure as well that, despite people's talk about Andersson's skating at the beginning of the season, he's still quicker than Stone and the Habs are a skating team when they are on their game (and not overly large).

It's too bad Dube isn't ready because he'd do well in this game. I guess he must have shown some rust. A skating, less physical game will also help Czarnik.

[goflamesgo18]

If Bennett keeps up the strong play and starts producing I'd like to see something like this...

Johnny - Mony - Lindy
Tkachuk - Bennett - Neal
Dube - Backlund - Frolik
Ryan - Janko - Czarnik/Hathaway

[Wolfman]

Originally Posted by goflamesgo18

If Bennett keeps up the strong play and starts producing I'd like to see something like this...

Johnny - Mony - Lindy
Tkachuk - Bennett - Neal
Dube - Backlund - Frolik
Ryan - Janko - Czarnik/Hathaway

I wonder if it might be time to try Bennett at C again now that he was been playing consistently. Might get his groove back. That would be a great 2nd line.

[GioforPM]

Originally Posted by goflamesgo18

If Bennett keeps up the strong play and starts producing I'd like to see something like this...

Johnny - Mony - Lindy
Tkachuk - Bennett - Neal
Dube - Backlund - Frolik
Ryan - Janko - Czarnik/Hathaway

If Bennett can handle centre and turns a corner, that's a nice lineup and probably something like what was expected when he was drafted.

As it is, that's a heavy load for Chucky - trying to get two slumping guys going.

Dube fits on that third line though. not a bad defensive/forechecking line. If said that Dube-Bennett-Frolik would look good too. Maybe some of Frolik's puck luck would rub off on the other two.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by Bingo

The starter (Turek) was hurt though.

They didn't have the option of testing the new guy while keeping the number one sharp.

Rittich did a face plant last year as the number one, he may do that again. Until proven otherwise Smith is the most likely bet to be the team's most dependable path to adequate goaltending based on his career and history.

If he continues to sputter though, I think you'll see Rittich get more and more rope to see if he hangs himself. If he doesn't a star is born!

In fairness the team quit and hung him out to dry. They had missed the playoffs and basically shut it down until Gulutzan was fired.

That was one of the most abysmal and pathetic stretches of hockey I've ever witnessed so I dont think you can draw too many meaningful conclusions from that.

[Bingo]

Originally Posted by Locke

In fairness the team quit and hung him out to dry. They had missed the playoffs and basically shut it down until Gulutzan was fired.

That was one of the most abysmal and pathetic stretches of hockey I've ever witnessed so I dont think you can draw too many meaningful conclusions from that.

The Flames were very much in it and pushing until they lost Tkachuk in that Islander game on home ice (March 11th), then it just fell apart.

But overall I agree ... he had 7 starts leading up to the March 11th Tkachuk injury .... only two ugly with an additional relief appearance that didn't go that well.

[GranteedEV]

After Smith's injury, here were the starts Rittich had:

AT Boston - I would call this an average start. The Flames were not very good that night, in fact that was one of the few times last year you could say they were dominated. He gave us a chance but faced too many scoring chances and ultimately that was the difference.

AT Nashville - This was actually a really good start and he elevated his play at the end of the game as Nashville made a push. His SV% stat is skewed by the fact that with a multi-goal lead he made a dangerous pass up the middle and got punished for it. It was a rookie mistake, not a faceplant.

VS Florida - SV% bad. Goals against were:
1 - A top scorner snipe from a guy coming directly through the slot. Partially on Rittich for not making a great glove save, but mostly on Giordano and Hamilton for a very loose gap. I would consider this a prime scoring chance.
2 - Vincent Trochek with a back door tap-in (!) on the rush (!) on the PK (!). 90% on Gio and Hamonic for allowing this breakaway, 10% on whoever took a penalty.
3 - A Perfect Power Play Deflection
4 - Barkov one-on-one with Rittich. Absolute breakdown. Gio had one rough game.

I'm willing to park this one and say that it's a SV% killer game, not a poorly goaltended one.

VS Boston - Rittich was our best player. SV% was .906 (league average was .908) but that's misleading because Rittich was arguably the prime reason we got to overtime, where Marchand had a breakaway GWG. I still think this is the best game I've seen Rittich play in a Flames jersey.

AT Vegas - Rittich was bad. This is the first game you could call a "faceplant" of any sort and I can tell you every goalie in the NHL has a game like this once in a while. The fact that Vegas had one of the highest SH% in the NHL last year probably contributed too as they were a confident team that picked corners on guys all year.

AT Colorado - Bad SV% but Rittich was our best in the first half of the game or we would have been down multiple goals, instead he put us up 2-0 at one point, but Flames kept taking bad, undisciplined penalties all night, highlighted one where...

1 - Nathan MacKinnon scores a perfectly placed PP goal, stick side, from his off-wing. Not much chance on it if any there. This goal was on Tkachuk for the terrible penalty.
2 - Zadorov wires a puck about 18-20" on Rittich, glove side. In terms of angle it was a stoppable shot, but it was perfectly placed as all butterfly goalies struggle with shots in that zone (above the pads, below the glove)
3 - Back door tap-in on the rush. Absolute breakdown on the backcheck, 100% on the skaters. Hasek isn't stopping this.
4 - A perfectly re-directed centering sauce pass on the rush that lifts off the ground. Rittich would have had to make a perfect save moving laterally to stop this, and I don't expect anyone to save it.

So one "stoppable" perfectly placed shot and three he had no chance on. Made a ton of great saves to give the team a chance. This was not a goaltending faceplant, it was a team meltdown.

And then he had two more starts before Smith came back from Injury, both of which he posted a .960+ SV%.

Rittich did not faceplant. It was a small sample size of games (eight starts) in which the team played some of its worst defensive hockey of the season in front of him. He had one start where he cost the team a win and the rest of his starts were the kind where if an established bigname "starter" were in net people would only be talking about the team's play, not the starter's play.

Rittich's eight starts with Smith injured would be a marked improvement over Smith's twelve starts this season. But one guy has an arbitrarily-decided "starter" label and continues to get chance after chance at the hope he can re-discover his game, as if only "backups" couldn't do the same if they "faceplant".

[LWcrowfoot]

Oh he face planted. His face planted so hard it was shocking he didn't have reconstructive surgery in the off season. Sample doesn't really matter, you can mess up in one, ten or twenty game segments. This just happened to be a FPpS-8.

Obviously a Face Plant per Segment of 20 would've been worse, but eight is bad enough.