The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 34: Spitting Hot Fire

Episode Date: December 11, 2015

Kent Wilson stops by to discuss how and why the Calgary Flames have fallen back down to earth this season after last year's playoff run. Beyond just their expected rudimentary possession struggles, we take a deeper look at a few other other factors doing them in including goaltending, and a highly questionable transition game out of their own zone. You can listen to every episode of this podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, or stream it from our website. Make sure to not only subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any new shows, but also leave us a nice review (if you think we’ve earned it!) Please also consider chipping in to help support the show (www.hockeypdocast.com/donate). A handful of you have done so already, and we greatly appreciate it. We’d love to be able to improve our equipment and cover some of the housekeeping costs associated with running this podcast. Thanks for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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I'm sure a lot of you listeners out there are familiar with his work over the years. He's been around the block. I think it's fair to say he was a funny little story. He was one of the bosses of the Nation Network when I was first kind of getting my foot in the door in this industry. And I'm not sure if he was necessarily a fan of my work or whatnot or someone recommended that they hire me. But for whatever reason, he okayed it. And that's how I got my start with Canucks Army. And that man is Kent Wilson.

Kent, how's it going, man? Good, how are you doing these days? I'm doing good, man. I'm excited to have you on. Travis and I, as I was telling you before we started recording, haven't necessarily had too many conversations about the Flames this year. We talked about them a little bit in our preseason predictions just because obviously the whole topic of how much they'd regress

and all that jazz was a pretty topical one around NHL circles. But beyond that, as the season's gone along, we haven't really kind of had a chance to dive deep into what they've been doing this year. So I figured you'd be a good guest to bring on and kind of chat about that with. Yeah, they've been a funny story combined last year and now this year the way they outperformed expectations and everything is completely inverted this season. Yeah, geez. the thing that kind of interest me about them, and I mentioned the whole regression thing, and that's all fine.

I think that these days people kind of get a little bit lazy sometimes with their analysis in the sense that they just look at, you know, PDO, for example, or possession rates, and they go, oh, this team, you know, doesn't have a lot of shot attempts or this team's riding the percentages, so they're going to, you know, fall back down earth, and they can get a little crazy with that. And for the most part, you know, that stuff does come to pass. and it makes sense, but I think they're kind of missing the point in the sense that the whole reason for a lot of these kind of new means of analysis that we've come up with and implemented in

our work is that they help bring our attention to various trends and patterns that we wouldn't have necessarily noticed from just watching the game kind of casually. And I think that for the flames in particular, they're an interesting bunch because I was obviously of the belief that they you know, wouldn't keep up that run in close games and pulling out all those miraculous performances late in games and the possession rate was obviously very concerning. But at the same time, I thought that some of them might be mitigated just because they do have quite a bit of high-end talent. And I really like their blue line.

But I don't know. Like, what do you think about the job Bob Hartley's done? Because I think listeners of this show are pretty familiar with how displeased I've been with the job he's done this season. Yeah, it was interesting coming into the year because I wanted to see how the decision makers would react to the team completely outperforming their expectations last year. And I actually thought the GM was extremely rational. Brad Trilliving went into the offseason and seemed to understand that the team couldn't continue to bank on high percentages and overtime wins and third period goals. So he went out and he got FroLeak and he got Hamilton.

He definitely improved the roster. So I want to see how the coaches would respond as well. And what happened was Hartley kind of went back to a lot of the formulas that seemed to be working last year in the first 25 games or so. So you saw the team collapsing a lot. You saw them trying to – their transition game was very dependent on long passes that the opposition seemed to be picking off more often than not. or turned into icings.

And without those third period comebacks and without sky high percentages, obviously that wasn't a winning formula. Yeah. Well, yeah, you mentioned the long stress passes and that's kind of the main issue I've had with the job Bob Hartley's done because I'm assuming that that's kind of his doing where he's, at least he or someone else in his coaching staff maybe is telling the Flames defensemen that that's kind of how they want to operate, how they want to break out, And it just been like, I've tracked a few of their games early in the season.

And it was just like wildly ineffective because they would just turn the puck over so frequently. And the thing that was kind of mind-boggling from me was that when you look at that roster, I think that, you know, at least on paper, the strength of the team is that back end. And for all the faults guys like Wyatman and Russell have, and we can get into that. As defensemen, I think that they're pretty talented guys with the puck and they can move. And they can do a few things there. and getting the puck off their stick as quickly as possible, it just seems like a very kind of bizarre and counterproductive way to use those guys.

Well, and the issue wasn't just the defenseman getting the puck off their stick quickly. It was a gross lack of support, puck support, around them when they're trying to break out. So I went to a game live early in the season. It was against St. Louis Blues. And it was a disaster. The flames, you know, all three forwards would fly the zone whenever a defenseman got it on his stick. And the blues would just sort of clog the neutral zone and it would turn into turnovers or passes into feet or passes to guys who are standing still or more often than not icings. And the flames just, they couldn't transition out of their own zone.

So they just got beaten up at five on five. And to tell you the truth, the teams actually seem to come out of that recently. their transition game looks a lot better. Maybe the last five, ten games, because I think the coaching staff has realized that a counterpunch strategy where you collapse all the time, block shots, and then try to have some sort of offense off the rush just isn't going to cut it.

Right, yeah. And we're seeing, you know, the Rangers, for example, have really been struggling with that this season. So that's interesting that you note that kind of counter a punch attack. Let's talk a little bit of those flame struggles because I was looking it up while I was researching for the show. And last year at this time, they were 17, 10, and 2, and they had a plus 12 goal differential, and they were looking pretty competitive. And then this year, obviously not so much.

They have the league worst minus 27 goal differential, and they've lost more games and they've won. And it's easy to say that, you know, the possession game has come back to kind of haunt them and kind of living by the sword, dying by the sword. But they're actually giving up fewer 5-15 shot attempts than they were last year, and they're taking more than themselves. And obviously all that's relative. I mean, their 47% rate is still not very desirable, but it's better than the 44% they were at last year.

So the big difference I'm seeing here is the goaltending performance. I think it's fair to say that that's probably the thing, been the one thing that's done them in the most, right? yeah no team survives the kind of goaltending the flames have gotten through the first quarter of the season I mean it was up until recently it was short-handed goaltending bad at even strength so even if they were a good possession team they'd be losing probably not as much as they are now but they wouldn't be a winning team that's for sure right so they're getting the seven we should say for listeners they're getting the second worst rate of saves

at 5 on 5 at 90% on them and that's really bad and kind of wondering what's happened to yonis hiller because obviously he's approaching his mid 30s now and we know that at any point as you kind of approach that age things can kind of just fall apart and he's dealt with a hip injury and but i don't know he's one of these guys that his peak performance over the last handful of years was never that great but his kind of trademark calling card if you will was that he was very reliable He was basically like a league average goal. You're slightly above for years on end. And there's something to be said for that.

And I'm sure that this Flames team would look a lot different if they were getting that Jonas Hiller. Like, I don't know. Like from watching him, do you think that it's a case of he's just like done and we're not going to see that guy from years past? Or do you think that maybe the injury issues are a big deal here? Or what's going on with him? It's hard to tell with the amount of games he's played.

I've seen all kinds of goaltenders. struggle for five to ten game samples for for no reason then it you know you go through dry spells just as shooters go through dry spells in the NHL so the goalies everything goes in on them for whatever reason I think I talked to well talked it was on Twitter I talked to Stephen Birch right and I asked I asked you know what are the chances of an average goaltender going through this sort of dry spell and I made it out I think it was 10 or 15 games for the flames and I applied it to the entire team because they were all bad at the time, but you can apply it to Hiller for this. And he said, you know, almost any average goaltender will probably go through

a dry spell like this once every four seasons roughly. So if I saw Hiller for the rest of the season, if he played, you know, 40, 50 games and it was this bad, you could probably say he's done. It might be age. It might be injuries. But we don't really know at this point. Right. And then the other guy in the picture is Kari Ramo. And I think that his kind of case study is an interesting one because the other team in Alberta has is kind of head over heels for Anders Nilsson right now. And understandably so, I mean, they haven't had too much good goaltending to cheer about over the years. But it's fascinating when you look at, you know, they have very similar resumes in the sense that early on in their NHL careers, they struggled pretty greatly and they went over to the KHL.

and I think Nielsen was only one year, Ramo was a few years where they kind of put their game together, I guess, and posted some nice numbers and appeared to get their careers back on track and came back to the NHL. And I think Romo early on kind of showed some flashes and people were, I guess, I don't know if they were crazy excited about him by any means, but they were at least vaguely optimistic. And I feel like at this point now,

we sort of realized that he's not necessarily a very good NHL goal. I don't know. Do you think he's, like, redeemable? like he's impending ufay this summer so i get the feeling that the flames probably aren't going to bring him back but given how they've handled the the goaltending combination this year i feel like you know all bets are off really yeah ramo's a relentlessly mediocre goaltender uh i think we know what's a nice way to say it yeah well the funny thing is is i'm almost certain that the coaching staff prefers him over hiller for whatever reason and that's the reason

Tree Living bothered to resign him this summer because otherwise I can't make heads or tails of the decision to retain Ramo when they had sort of this clear succession plan with Hiller to be the starter again this year and Orio to kind of make his way up and try to be at least a backup at the NHL level. And then they brought in Ramo

it created this three-headed monster. They lost Paul Byron on waivers because of that at the start of the season for no good reason. And that orio was subsequently placed on waivers and is now in the minors. Were you surprised and no team claimed him? I was a little bit surprised, I guess. Not at all.

I think, no, I mean, at the start of the season, maybe. But given the way the Flames' goaltending had gone up until that point, and he'd had, I don't know, a handful of appearances, none of which had gone well. They sent him down at a point where the Flames' goaltending looked like, a sort of plague to be avoided. And there wasn't a team in the league that had sort of a glaring need for a goaltender, so the timing helped. I guess it kind of speaks to just the spread of goaltending all across the league,

how much better it is in 2015 than it was even maybe five years ago, where they're just like, it feels like every team has two reliable guys that they can play without, you know, feeling completely insecure. and I don't know, I guess maybe that's not the best time to make that comment after we just spent 10 minutes talking about the Flames because they might be the one team in the league that hasn't necessarily had that to fallback on. What do you think they're going to do the summer then, Annette, because we mentioned Hillers and impending UFA and Ramo is as well. And I don't know, like, do you think they're going to give Orteo another look at it or do you think that, I know, I know you wrote about this for Flames Nation, but I guess maybe we could dive into a little more where I'm wondering if they're going to, you know, target someone else on the free agent market or via trade or I don't know, what's going to give there? Well, there's lots of time left in the season, so maybe one of these guys rebounds and convinces them to resign them. I don't think that's likely.

But as I detailed in that article you mentioned, there's at least 10 existing options either as trade targets or on the UFA market that the flames could look at and at least get one of them in as a veteran starter to and then maybe give Ward you another chance. but if they need two guys, again, there's 10 guys out there that they could look at. And, I mean, Bernier is potentially the most interesting option for me, just because I think he wouldn't cost much to get. He's not a huge commitment because his deal only lasts for another year. And as a guy who has the sort of pedigree, aside from the dry spell he's going through, and we just talked about the randomness of dry spells, even for good goaltenders, or at least average ones, maybe he has upside.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think he definitely has the upside, the kind of war on taking a risk on him, especially if he's going to come for a bag of sticks and pucks. So let's kind of move along and look ahead to the summer. Obviously, I'm not by any means kind of writing off the flames and the rest of their season, even though they've looked bad. I think they've kind of shown that anything's really possible with them, and I wouldn't even be remotely surprised given the Pacific Division struggles

to see them in that race as the year gets going. But looking ahead to the summer, I mean, let's assume nothing crazy happens in this regard. What would you do if you were running the flames and you had to decide on Yuri Hoodler? Because he's about to turn 32 years old and he's coming off of easily his best season where he was, I think, nearly a point of game. And I know, he's an interesting player. I feel like he doesn't necessarily move the needle that much. But at the same time, he's one of those guys is just like a really good compliment.

piece in the sense that if you put him with the right players, he can really be effective. And over his career, he's shown that he generally is a guy that for whatever reason, I know some people are skeptical of this, but he just always has these high percentages. And I don't know if that speaks to his skill or circumstance or what, but it's just the way it's been. And I don't know, I'm kind of curious about how he's going to age and also how big of a commitment someone's going to make to him, because I'd be pretty wary of giving him. long term but I think that if you're kind of kind of raised the average salary early on and

keep the years short I think that that might be an interesting proposition. We'll talk about the kind of playeries and then we'll get into the cap considerations which are really what are going to determine how the flames deal with him but you're right I think he is a kind of player who can drive percentages to some degree he's certainly no Henrik Siddine or or Crosby. But he is a guy who can, I think, move the needle a bit. He's not a possession player, which is the reason he's never sort of stepped into the true elite class.

Last year, notwithstanding, that was sort of he rode the wave, whatever that wave was that carried the flames to the playoffs. This year he's kind of come back down to earth, although it's funny. His PTO, I think, was 103 last year. This year, it's 95. and people are kind of skeptical about him. I think he's going to rebound in the second half of the season probably end in the 55 point area that he usually does.

And that's a good, useful player. And for the flames on the right-hand side, they don't actually have a lot internally. They have Fralik, who they acquired, obviously, and he's more of a two-way, 40-point guy every year. David Jones, who's probably going to leave as well. even if they retain him, David Jones at this point is, you know, he is what he is a third, probably a third line guy. Right.

But beyond those guys, there's not much in the hopper for the flame. So if they do let huddler go, they have to find something else, be it through trade or the market. So if they determine that it's going to cost more through those areas to replace them, they might decide to keep them. Right. Yeah. So what do you think that a realistic deal is for him? And maybe it's not even from the flames. Like I'm wondering if he's going to be the type of guy

where a middling team is just going to look at him and be like, especially if he has like a hot stretch the end of the year, for example, and winds up above 60 points again or something like that. And a team goes like, all right, well, we're going to overpay a little bit here to bring him in

and hope that he can either work with one of our incumbent stars or he can kind of carry the load on a second line, for example. and they will kind of wind up regretting that in a few years as he declines with age. But I'm kind of curious, I can't really peg down what he's actually going to go for this summer, I guess. Yeah, it's tough. I definitely know that he and his agent are probably going to swing for the fences because this will be his last, probably his last opportunity to get a big contract. So they're going to go for term and they're going to go for dollars.

And that's one of the other issues that I brought up when we started talking about this is the flames have Johnny Goodro coming up. for renewal. Sean Monaghan, Mark Gierdano's raise, kicks in next year, and the salary cap isn't really going up. So if he comes out and says, I need $5.5 to $6.5 million to stick around, even if the flames have an appetite for him, they may not be able to afford them unless they can get rid of some of their other bad contracts. But I can definitely see someone giving him north of $5 million a year, especially if he's 55, $60 points again this season. Yeah, no, that definitely seems like a realistic possibility, especially. I mean, we've seen teams get a little bit smarter last year on July 1st, but I feel like there's still that potential for a team to just, you know,

recklessly spend just because they can and Hooler could be the type of guy that really benefits from that. Okay, so let's talk big picture here about the flames because I'm kind of curious what the vibe in Calgary is like about them, because obviously for a few years there, they were sort of like the poster child of what you don't want to be as a organization where they weren't necessarily bad enough to fully bottom out like the oilers and get incredibly high picks. But they also weren't good enough to either make the playoffs or when they did to really make a run and kind of, that's a position you really don't want to be in if you're any franchise. And I feel like they did a pretty decent admirable job, I guess, of kind of accumulating

this young talent without those really, really high draft picks. And there's obviously guys to be really excited about right now. I mean, Johnny Goodrow is one of the funnest players in the league to watch. And I guess in a little bit we can talk about him at three on three because for my money, he's easily the funnest guy in the league to watch in that aspect of the game. But then you have guys like Sam Bennett and T.J. Brody and obviously, even though he struggled early on, I feel like a guy like Dougie Hamilton still has endless potential. So I'm kind of curious, did last year like appease fans to the point where they can remain patient here and kind of get another high draft pick this year and then get back after it next year or the year after or did it sort of

last year's kind of miraculous run just get people excited to the point where they just want more of it and regardless at what cost i think it's kind of settling in for most of the fan base now that last year was um a mirage a wonderful wonderful mirage that was fun the live through but probably not the reality and you know you've seen some of the the knee-jerk stuff where maybe we should trade Giordano or look to trade this young guy or that young guy or, you know, Dougie Hamilton during his struggles, you know, get rid of this guy. But mostly I've seen people be pretty even keel and level-headed about it, just because this is still kind of the beginning of a rebuild.

It's not the middle and it's not the, it's not 10 years in like the unfortunate Edmunds Noilers. So people have kind of gotten back to, okay, well, We do have all these good pieces. You know, our GM made some good moves in the summer. There's upside here, and maybe we just have to wait a little longer to really see it. Yeah, that's fair. Okay, so I mentioned the three-on-three thing,

and I'm kind of curious what your take is. I don't know how much of three-on-three every time you've seen league-wide, but Travis and I talk about it on this podcast all the time where it's honestly, I can't believe we spent that many years without it in our lives. I feel like I constantly, every time nights like tonight, recording this on a Thursday or Tuesday or Saturday, for example, when there's a lot of games on. I kind of keep a close eye on that three-on-three overtime alert account just to make sure that I'm not missing any three-on-three sessions.

And the flames have been one of the funnest teams to watch in three-on-three and one of the most successful. And obviously, that's pretty much entirely due to Johnny Goodroll. I'm kind of curious, like, from what you've seen, do you think that they've nailed down like a certain strategy to how to approach three-on-three? you think it's just like a small sample size thing or is it just well have johnny gudrow which 29 other teams don't like i'm kind of curious like if there's something to glean from that early on moving forward where other teams can replicate it or whatnot or whether it's just like uh one of those

things is just unique to the flames yeah i don't think there's any particular strategy to the flames um i'm using them to make them success the fun thing with three on three is strategy starts to get a little less important than skill, right? Because there's only so much you can, only so much you can drop on the whiteboard. But when it comes to three-on-three, there's way more room, and there's way more chances for mistakes,

and there's way more stuff to do. So, yeah, the benefit is a guy like Johnny Goodrow. And they also have, you know, T.J. Brody, who's a fantastic skater, great, no nice, great passer, and Mark Gerdano. So there's a couple other pieces. But yeah, in the end, they have a tiny wizard who can go around everyone else when it's only three on three. Right. I don't know.

Do you think he's going to replace Tyler Johnson as like the guy, the talking heads just go like, oh, this, this, like all the small guys coming up to the NHL are going to kind of try to replicate his magic and be the next Johnny Goodrow. Because I feel like for a short span there, Tyler Johnson was that guy. But he's kind of struggled this year and Goodro has remained his pace. I kind of feel like he's taken that corner over. yeah definitely i think he's going to be that player for years to tell you the truth i followed him since he was in college hockey and he was shocking people then and he's just kind of gotten better and better and it's funny when he arrived in in tagri a lot of people were saying well it's little he needs to go to the hl to learn pro hockey and even before he started

i said it's not going to happen he's just he's an n hler yeah so yeah i know it's it's it's worked out I think that if anyone can kind of replicate that magic, that would be a good thing to strive for, but I'm not sure how realistic it is for most people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, one final thing before I let you go, and we probably should have just talked about this at the start because it's not really very flames-related, but whatever, if there are still a few listeners out there who haven't turned it off yet after the 25 minutes or so of Flames talk, this might interest

them. And it's my co-host, Travis Yost wrote about this today, and it was the kind of idea of we don't really have a great understanding of how to evaluate defensemen properly or you know if we do it's it's not really being applied correctly and i know that i guess it is sort of flames related because uh for a while there they were they were riding guys like widened and and russell really hard uh even though many metrics suggested that they shouldn't be doing that but i guess you know they kind of capture the imagination of people with their, you know, their gritty shot blocking and stuff like that, especially in Russell's case. And I think most people kind of recognize by now that blocking a lot of shots isn't a good thing because it means that you're, you don't have the puck. And I think you have the great quote in that regard where you mentioned that, you know, it's better than the alternate. It's like kind of, it's like killing rats or something, right? Where it's like, it's better than an alternative.

but ultimately it's like a sign of a bigger problem if you have to keep doing it. And that really applies there with the flames. So stretching it back to the full NHL, we saw a guy like Mark Fane get sent down to the other day. And I think people were pretty optimistic about him during his time in New Jersey. And he's a guy that had really good shot metrics, for example. And Edmonton dished out quite a bit of money to bring him over as a free agent. And he obviously hasn't worked out.

I don't know. I'm kind of curious, like, what do you think the next wave of tools we can use to evaluate the fensman is? Because you're a guy that's, I don't mean to age you here, but you've been around for this whole sort of analytics movement. And you've seen a lot of things come and go. And you've been here sort of since the beginning. So you can speak to this maybe better than most people can. But kind of like, do you think there's something that we're going to come up with in the next year or two? I think that stuff like zone exits, for example, which we talked about is something that is really telling for defensemen. And I think it's something that if we can eventually have that publicly available would go a long way to our understanding of how which defensemen are good and which ones aren't because there's so many kind of subtle nuances to defending at the NHL level. And it's generally, if you get noticed very often, it's probably for, it's not a good thing, right? Like it means you're making glaring mistakes.

I'm kind of curious. Do you think there's something that we can come up with in the next year or two or maybe down the line that's going to help us iron some of these wrinkles out? Yeah, it's been a big question for years. On the hierarchy of evaluating players in terms of difficulty, you know, forwards were always the easiest. And it was true when we started doing stuff like Korsi back in the day. You could even see it in the draft records. When you see teams, they're pretty good at.

evaluating forwards at the top of the draft. Defensemen, a little less so. And as we all know, you shouldn't take goalie in the first couple of rounds because, you know, everyone is terrible at evaluating goalies relatively. So the challenge with defensemen is, especially on the defensive side of the puck, is you're trying to look for evidence of an absence, which means you're trying to look for evidence of preventing goals, which is a lot harder than just looking for goals, which is what you're doing for offense. So, you know, coaches and evaluators have created proxies over the years

of what they think represents good defensive ability, which is the old, you know, is the guy a hard hitter, or is he clearing those crease, or is he blocking shots, which are, you know, aspects of being a defenseman and doing defense, but they're actually kind of pale proxies and probably not all that effective at all at telling us who is good at denying, truly denying shots. Right. The big challenge, too, for defensemen is, you know, the third-paring guy versus the first-paring guy. Vic Ferrari looked at this way back in the day.

First-paring guys tended to have slightly worse on ice shooting, safe percentages behind them, but that's because they were facing, you know, the Crosby's and the Ovetians of the world and not the Tim Jackman. So as guys move up the roster, they're going to have much tougher. assignments. So even relative metrics within a team are tough to apply, especially to defensemen, because the quality of their assignments change is so drastically. So I don't really know necessarily what the answer is. It could be some sort of league-wide relative metric when it comes to high danger shots, but even that, I don't know. Right. Yeah, we're not sure how kind of relatable that is from year to year, how much it varies and whatnot.

Exactly. Yeah. It's an issue with that. Yeah, no, I think it's going to be fascinating. And I think that it's going to be, it's an important topic because, you know, you see how much some of these defensemen are being paid and you don't really want to get stuck with a bad contract for a guy that you're, you know, when you're mapping out your team, you're thinking, okay, this guy's going to come in and, you know, play 22 minutes, for example, and we're going to be able to rely on him.

And then he shows up and he's not the player you signed up for. And that's a massive issue, even more so than for forwards, because they're just using a larger percentage of the ice time to kind of spread out across the team. So I think that that's going to be something we're going to have to work on as a hockey community. And I think that in a couple of years we'll eventually get there. But that's still one of the big glaring holes that we have. Well, I mean, to talk on that a little further, to tell you the truth, that shot metrics are decent now at, at least avoiding the big landmines. So McDonald in Philadelphia and even Chris Russell and Calgary, those are pretty obvious, even without any sort of new metrics that we might come up with,

that you know, you shouldn't sign these players for huge dollars and expect them to be top four defensemen because that's going to end badly. Now, there's probably way more nuance out there that I'm not sure shot metrics can provide at this point. But even right now, if there's GMs out there that don't look at these things, they probably should because they won't be signing Andrew. McDonald for five, five over five. Yeah. Well, you bring up Chris Russell.

I feel like that's going to be a very interesting litmus test for how far we've come as a hockey community because whether it's the flames or someone else, like, I'm fascinated to see what he goes for this summer because he is a guy who, you know, like, Andrew McDonald's big thing was, okay, this guy eats a lot of minutes and that's very reliable. You can't kind of undervalue what that means for a team. and obviously if you're kind of getting caved in during those minutes, well, then, I mean, I could play 25 minutes. I probably wouldn't do well, but in theory I could. So it's not necessarily like a very good selling point.

But I feel like there still might very well be one team out there that just looks at Chris Russell and looks at their roster, current roster, and goes, well, we can pencil him at least as like a second pairing guy. And they're going to give him way more than he's worth. And I think that we're all going to wind up laughing at that team, of course. course, but it's going to be fascinating to see whether that actually happens or whether teams have gotten smarter as a whole and he gets a much more reasonable sort of, I don't know if it's like around $3 million or something for a couple years instead. So I guess we'll maybe have to talk again this summer and figure out where we're at with that. Yeah, well, the tricky thing with Russell is he's not a bad player by eye. He's the kind of guy you would think would be privileged by

the new NHL. He's mobile. He looks good with the puck. He can make moves in certain areas. So he's tricky in a lot of sense. He, you know, he was playing 24 minutes a night up until recently. He wears a letter on the flames. He works really hard. So he has all of these very conventional, you know, boxes that he checks off. So it's not even just that he plays a lottery was liked by this particular coach. He's a very, let's say, seductive player if you're not looking at stuff like possession. Right. Yeah. No, that's a very good point. Kent, where can people find you? I know that you still, unfortunately, you don't write nearly as much as you used to, but I know that you do some stuff at Flames Nation every once in a while. How often can people can expect work from you and where can they find you on

Twitter. Yeah, I write about about 10 articles a month on Flames Nation. Every so often I'll show up in the Calgary Herald when you ask me to do something. Oh, nice. So does that make you a mainstream media guy? I don't think so. No, I didn't, I don't ever press pass. But on Twitter, I'm Kent underscore Wilson.

Excellent. Well, Kent, man, it's been a lot of fun. Hopefully as the year goes along, maybe, you know, I guess we'll see where the flames go. If they go on another one of those magical runs, I guess we'll have to have to have you back on and if they kind of fall apart and become sellers or whatnot we'll also have to bring you on as well so either way it works out well for you yeah i look forward to it and if vancouver is struggling greatly later in the year i'd love to come on and talk about that too oh excellent

yeah well we can definitely do that all right we'll talk soon but the hockey pdo cast online at hawkipedocast com. Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, or follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and at Travis Yost.