Calgary Flames Daily: Bye-week, two players named to three stars

The Calgary Flames are now on a bye-week, so no Flames hockey for five days. Let’s check out some more news surrounding this team.

This will be a long five days. The Calgary Flames are now on their mandatory five-day break that every team in the NHL must take. But this couldn’t come at a worse time for the red-hot team. They’re coming off a seven-game win streak and still remain undefeated in 2018 – the only team to do so.

For some reason, they’re still ranked at no.22 in The Score’s power rankings… and Edmonton, who went 2-2-0 last week, have lost three of their last five, and have lost seven of their last 10, were ranked at 10th place. Do I not understand power rankings correctly, or does this just not make sense?

Back to the Flames, even though they’ve been hot, they have still been outshot in their last four games. But after playing well in December and not getting rewarded a lot, head coach Glen Gulutzan is happy for his team.

Related Story: Flames head into bye-week on seven-game win streak

Via Calgary Sun:

"“This is kind of where we started last year when we went on that run,” said Flames head coach Glen Gulutzan, referring to the team’s 10-game win streak that started of 2016-17before the 2017 NHL All-Star break. “You know what, these guys always had it in them. I always thought they could get on a little run here. Eight or nine games before this started, we started playing pretty good hockey but we weren’t getting the results … you’ve gotta be happy for the guys.”"

Speaking of being hot, the team as a whole isn’t the only one. Johnny Gaudreau was ranked as the NHL’s first star of the week last week and Mike Smith was ranked as the second star. This is quite an exciting feat since this is also the first time any Flames player has been named a star of the week, let alone two in one week. Last week, Gaudreau had two goals and eight points in four games. He’s also on a seven-game point streak with 13 points in that seven-game stretch. He climbed his way back up the points stats and is tied for second in points again with 54 in 45 games. In December, he took somewhat of a dip, but he’s been getting back in it.

For Smith, he stopped 104 of 108 shots last week and went 3-0-0 with a 0.663 sv%. He continues to be the best road goaltender in the league with a 0.946 sv%. Smith himself is on a six-game win streak with a 0.941 sv% in that stretch. He almost had a shutout in the game vs. the Carolina Hurricanes, but a few too many penalties for the Calgary Flames and the Canes scored with less than five minutes to go in the game.

On another piece of news, the Flames have reassigned three players back to Stockton. Andrew Mangiapane, Marek Hrivik, and Ryan Lomberg. However, they most likely did that because it’s bye-week and to get those guys games in this week. With injuries, the Flames only have 11 active forwards. So they’ll absolutely have to recall at least one of those players by Saturday and we can probably assume it’ll be Mangiapane for sure.

Flames Tweet of the day

Hockey Tweet of the day

Some links surrounding the Flames

Flames win over Hurricanes makes them the NHL’s hottest team right now (Calgary Sun).

Flames Thoughts: Calgary’s forward depth helps extend win streak (Sportsnet).

NHL call-ups live ‘hour-by-hour’: Flames send three back to Stockton (Calgary Sun).

Gaudreau leads 3 Stars of the Week (NHL.com).

Some links surrounding hockey and the NHL

Methodology: How we built one of the best NHL prediction models anywhere (The Globe and Mail).

3 up, 3 down: Mathieu Perreault an elite depth scorer for Jets (Sportsnet).

MLK Challenge about more than hockey (NHL.com).

Next: Three former Flames make Team Canada Olympic roster

That’s all in today’s Calgary Flames Daily!