Burning Down the House

The Blame Game

How’s that saying go? “Listen to the fans too much and you’ll be one”?

Given the twitchy, vitriolic, and often brain-cramping nonsense filtering through Calgary newspapers and radio call-in shows in the days following the Flames’ game 6 loss to the young Blackhawks, I think that would probably be true.

Fans, and even some “journalists” (*cough* Dowbiggen *cough*) are calling for a blow-up, stringing together any and all combinations of frenzied demands: fire the coach, fire the GM, trade Iginla/Langkow/Kiprusoff/Phaneuf (especially Phaneuf!).

They call it being an “armchair GM” for a reason… you can’t do any damage from there.

And if you think I’m going heavy on the sarcastic quotation marks here, then you’re right. It’s the only way I can keep my sanity.

I have huge respect for the radio voices of the Fan 960 (Calgary’s only sports radio station). Kerr, Boomer, Richards, and the rest of the boys have done a pretty good job of keeping a level head and not degenerating into pitchfork-armed witchhunters.

Breaking down this season will be a huge task, and I’m glad that Darryl Sutter is taking until early next week before making any comments to the media. If you’re going to run a pro sports franchise, making snap decisions while emotions are still frayed will get you nowhere. Sutter is absolutely doing the right thing in taking time to evaluate everything and letting people cool off a little bit.

In this and my next few posts, I’ll try to drop the short term disappointment and look at the options with a longterm perspective. So here we go, option #1:

1. Fire the GM

I think this is a hilarious notion. This is a team hailed by nearly everybody from September up until the start of Game 5 that people were praising as a team built for the playoffs. This is a team that was (unfairly, and it shouldn’t have happened) overhyped by the media as being “elite” in December and January. It is not Sutter’s fault that fan expectations are through the roof when they shouldn’t be.

Sutter brought in Glencross, Bourque, and Bertuzzi this summer, all on good contracts, and all played well for this team. He recently signed David Moss to a SWEETHEART deal (3 years, $1.3M per). Nevermind that he’s drafted extremely well in the last four years (Backlund, Nemisz, Aulie, Negrin, Pelech, Irving, Keetley, Lalande, Wahl, Baldwin, Chucko, Prust, Pardy, Boyd, in no particular order) from deep in the draft, all while making draft-day deals that get the whole city talking (Tanguay, Cammalleri).

Sutter rolls the dice, and I love it. Everybody jumped all over him for his deadline deals this season because it resulted in salary cap hell down the stretch… but I would have done the same thing. He gambled that the team wouldn’t run into a catastrophic run of injuries and unfortunately he was wrong. That said, I would way rather have a GM whose unafraid to go for the homerun than one who gets fired for being too timid/conservative to do anything (Doug Risebrough, raise your hand).

And, lets face it. Even if you suppose that the money existed for a full lineup and that resulted in 2 extra points, would the playoff result have been any different? Maybe this battered group makes it through the league’s hottest team in the 2nd half, maybe they don’t. Either way, there’s no way you win two series with hobbled players like Regehr, Phaneuf, Sarich, Langkow, Bourque, and Conroy.

Jordan Leopold was a fantastic addition. Can you imagine our defense down the stretch without him? There are Leopold haters out there in this city, and frankly, I do not understand it. But then, I played defense all my life, so maybe I have a better understanding of the position than the average Joe (no offense to you above-average Joes!).

Get ready for controversy here… Olli Jokinen was an even better pick-up. The common rant right now is that Olli’s big salary resulted in the Flames having to play with a short bench during the last few regular season games… which I’ll grant is at least partly true.

But the true genius of the Jokinen trade is this: Jokinen is Cammalleri’s replacement.

Maybe I’m giving the GM too much credit, but I would be pretty surprised if he didn’t have at least one conversation with Cammy’s agent (or with Cammy himself) before the trade deadline about signing a possible extension. This is a player who wants to see what July 1st can bring him, and good for him! To do anything else would be foolish, given that pro hockey players only have a few opportunities to cash in and make their money during their relatively brief careers. If you think that Sutter didn’t have a strong suspicion that Cammalleri’s great season was going to price him out of Calgary’s salary structure, then you’re dreaming.

There’s also the fact that unless Cammalleri is scoring goals, he’s not doing anything. I don’t want to rag on the guy because of his stature, but the truth is… how many times was he just a few inches away from completing a pokecheck? How many times did he bounce off a bigger player along the boards, or shy away from contact completely? The bottom line is that Cammalleri at $3.5M is a great player in the salary cap world.

Cammalleri at $5M-$6M, however, is not.

For that big a chunk of a team’s salary cap, you had better do more than just shoot the puck a lot. Especially when you’re taking passes (and presumably, stealing goals) from the team’s other best shooter. And definitely in a world where the cap is expected to go down in the next two years!

So now we head into summer without needing to wonder who fills that role. We don’t have to worry about whether Matt Lombardi (bless his little rocket feet) can finally become a 1st line center. We finally have that big 1st line center that Langkow has never been.

And what’s better, you get him for the last year of his contract and with an entire summer of working with the Flames’ training and conditioning staff (if you heard Rob Kerr and Eric Francis being nice and calling him a “throwback to the 70s or 80s… physically, that is… then you get what I’m saying). Flames fans: if you liked Mighty Mite Cammalleri this season, I’m thinking you will love Olli Jokinen next year.

There are deficiencies on this roster, that is for sure. One only needed to see how the powerplay took a nosedive once Giordano went down. The team needs more mobile defenders who are confident with the puck. And while the GM isn’t responsible for motivating his players, he is responsible for ensuring that a coaching staff is in place that can.

That’s my defense of the GM.