Calgary Flames three stars of the week: November 5-11
It’s another week done in the NHL! Let’s check out who we picked for our three Calgary Flames stars for the week of November 5th-11th.
This week wasn’t as successful as the Calgary Flames would have liked, but it wasn’t all bad. They went 1-2-0 and overall had good games against all three teams. Since it was a California road-trip, ideally they would have gone 3-0-0, but the Flames have now won five of their last, so we can’t totally complain.
Against the Anaheim Ducks, they lost 3-2 and everyone somewhat came for Mike Smith‘s throat since nobody wanted him to get the start anyway. The Flames then played the LA Kings where they shut them out 1-0 before finishing off against the San Jose Sharks in a 3-1 loss.
Unfortunately, this week wasn’t all that offensively successful for the team. Scoring just four goals in three games when they were averaging 3.47 goals/gp prior to this.
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The good news for the Flames is that the rest of the Pacific Division is doing all that great, so they’re still sitting in second place in the division with 21 points in 18 games. They’re currently 10-7-1 on the season, which is almost identical to where they were at at this point last season, being 10-8-0.
All that being said, let’s check out who we here at Flame for Thought picked as our three stars this past week.
Third star
Mark Jankowski
Mark Jankowski doesn’t generally find his name on a “three stars” list often, but he made it on ours this week! To be quite fair, since this week wasn’t all that successful for the Calgary Flames, it’s somewhat of slim-pickings at this point (sorry Mark).
In the 3-2 loss to the Ducks, Jankowski not only scored his first goal of the season, but scored it shorthanded. This was a significant moment in the game because the Ducks were on the powerplay in the third period and were up 2-1, so scoring a shorthanded goal to tie up the game in the final frame was huge for the team… until the Ducks made it 3-2 less than 30 seconds later.
Other than that goal, Janko also recorded an assist in the 3-1 loss to the Sharks by intelligently and subtly sliding the puck to Sean Monahan to make it a one-goal game and give the Flames some life and overall, was quite good this week, especially against the Sharks.
The fourth line, in general, the last few weeks have been quite good. They battle hard and put lots of pressure on the forecheck and have been doing quite good in terms of possession. This week, Jankowski won the majority of his faceoffs against the Ducks and the Kings and had great possession numbers in all three games which is basically all you can ask for from a fourth-line center who gets a limited amount of minutes a night. And that’s why he’s our third star of the week.
Second star
Travis Hamonic
Travis Hamonic was another player who had one of his best weeks this season. He scored the lone goal in the win against the Kings to earn the first star of the game and had arguably his best game as a member of the Calgary Flames.
While he didn’t have that great of a game against the Sharks (to be fair, he wasn’t the only one), he was incredible against the Ducks and the Kings and he along with Noah Hanifin were the best duo on the ice. And against the Sharks, he played well against their top defencemen like Brent Burns and Erik Karlsson.
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Throughout the season since coming back from his injury, he leads all Flames defencemen with 58.41 CF% and 59.39 SCF% (5v5). To be fair, he has played less games than the rest of the defencemen due to injury and he did return as the Flames became tighter defensively, but that could also be due to him returning to the lineup and Michael Stone being a healthy scratch.
Hamonic isn’t the most offensively gifted defencemen, but the Flames aren’t expecting him to be. So that goal against the Kings was huge for his and the team game. For these reasons, he earned the honour of being our second star of the week.
First star
David Rittich
We love starting goaltender David Rittich! While Rittich only played in one game last week, he still earns the first star of the week. He recorded his very first career shutout in their 1-0 win against the LA Kings as he stopped all 21 shots he faced.
21 shots isn’t that high or anything, but many of those shots were quality chances by the Kings and goaltenders often say it’s harder when they face fewer shots.
With that win, Rittich improved to 5-1-0 on the season and has half of the Calgary Flames wins in just six games to improve to a 0.935 sv%. He’s also been great on the road (like he was last season as well) posting a 0.959 sv%.
On top of all these, of goaltenders who have played a minimum of 100 minutes at 5v5 he’s sixth in the league in sv% at 0.950. He also has a quality-start percentage of 0.833 and has only let in four high-danger shots against of the 53 he has faced (5v5). To put that into perspective, Mike Smith has allowed 18 high-danger shots against on 90 shots.
Rittich definitely deserves more starts, which is something we found ourselves saying last season after a few months as well. However, Smith did play a good game against the Sharks on Sunday evening and he will probably get the start against the Montreal Canadiens. However, it seems like the Flames don’t necessarily hold Smith accountable a whole lot and continue to give him undeserved starts over Rittich.
Anyways, this was not supposed to be a bashing-Mike-Smith post. We’ve done too many of those.
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For all these reasons stated, David Rittich earns our first start of the week! Also because he and Matthew Tkachuk look like they give the best hugs.