Calgary Flames Daily: Monahan shines, more arena talks

Sean Monahan had a nice breakaway last night and we’ve got some more arena talks. Let’s check out some Calgary Flames news over the last 24 hours.

The Calgary Flames played another exhibition game last night against the Winnipeg Jets. They weren’t so lucky. To be fair, there were really only about four NHL players in the lineup last night for the Flames while the Jets had quite the lineup of their NHL guys. The Jets won 5-2.

The Flames still have two more exhibition games, one will be the final one on Saturday against the Jets again. The Flames have won just one exhibition game. But no need to fret: every year since 2011, the Stanley Cup Champions haven’t been over 0.500 during their preseason games. And last year, the Colorado Avalanche won every exhibition game and they finished the season off with 48 points.

Something positive about last night was Sean Monahan. After missing two games, he came back and opened up the Flames scoring with a beauty of a breakaway goal from a nice pass by Spencer Foo.

Typical Monahan, he said he just got lucky.

Via Calgary Herald:

Getting a couple of goals out of the way in pre-season, it gives you that little boost of confidence.Just a lucky bounce there to be able to bat it through my legs and hop in on a breakaway. When you have a breakaway, your eyes start glowing, so that was nice.

Calgary Flames

Spencer Foo and head coach Glen Gulutzan seem to disagree that it was just “lucky”.

“That’s an incredible play,” said Foo. “He’s obviously a special player, and special players do things like that.”“That was a high-level play,” agreed Flames head coach Glen Gulutzan. “If you look at the pick-up on the goal, just to get that puck and then in tight with a lot of pressure and what a release … He just has a knack. He has a great release. We saw that just passing pucks to him in practice — he doesn’t need much to get that shot off, and it’s quick and accurate.”

Now onto things that I’m sick of talking about. The Calgary Flames arena. Yesterday, Flames CEO Ken King held a luncheon to discuss more things to do with the arena. And he says that the market in Calgary is falling.

Via Sportsnet:

We’ve gone from a top-10 revenue contributing team, where we wrote the cheques in the last few years to help the other teams, and we have now crossed the line. We’re now receivers. We’ll get a cheque this year.Isn’t that ridiculous in this beautiful market? It shows where this is heading and it’s in the wrong direction.[Under NHL revenue sharing, the league’s richest teams give up a portion of their revenue to help lower-grossing clubs pay players.]I can say sadly we have crossed one of the remedies off the list and that is the new facility. I honestly do not know where that part of the story is going to end.

Flames Tweet of the day

Hockey Tweet of the day

Thanks, John.

Links surrounding the Flames

Monahan’s breakaway beauty a bright spot in Flames’ exhibition loss to Jets (Calgary Herald).

THN’S 2017-18 SEASON PREVIEW: CALGARY FLAMES (The Hockey News).

‘We’re not in politics’: Calgary Flames president says arena talk not aimed at influencing election (CBC News).

Flames president says team is becoming a have-not NHL market (Sportsnet).

Links surrounding hockey and the NHL

Sept. 25: NHL Preseason Roundup (NHL.com).

Nikita Soshnikov’s NHL chances damaged by summer of distress (Sportsnet).

Leafs’ Matthews looks ready to go as hat-trick sinks Habs (CBC Sports).

Eight players who have raised eyebrows in the NHL pre-season (The Hockey News).

Next: 9 days until the season starts - #9 Lanny McDonald

That’s all in today’s Flames Daily!