What always confused me at the time though, was how they managed to then miss the playoffs for four years straight from 2010 to 2013. The Flames of that era had a good if not great goaltender in Kiprusoff, a regular 30-50 goal scorer in Iginla, lots of scoring depth in players like Jokinen, Conroy, Glencross, Langkow, etc, a reasonably strong D corps including a young Giordano (cant seem to recall if he was considered a top defenseman in the NHL like he was 2-3 years ago), and Bouwmeester, who I recall was not considered quite elite, but still above average for defencemen in that era. If my memory serves me correctly, the 2010-13 Flames were also considered quite tough for the time, and I cant pick out a glaring weakness at any position. What was it with those Flames? I wouldn't have considered them true cup contenders at the time, but they seemed like they should have been more than capable of scraping into the playoffs in at least one of those years.
What afflicted the Flames of those years is what has afflicted most mediocre teams: miserable consistency and a lack of meaningful depth.
The "reasonably strong D-corps" you speak of was not particular strong at all, post-2007. To put it into perspective in '05-'06—easily the best year they've had since 2004—they likely had the stingiest D in the NHL, with Robyn Regehr, Jordan Leopold, Roman Hamrlik, rookie Dion Phaneuf, Rhett Warrener and Andrew Ference. In reality neither Phaneuf nor Ference were actually very good on defence, but with Miikka Kiprusoff behind them they were bailed out often. Kipper was... just amazing; so, so great. That team was screwed without him; he covered a preposterous amount of gaffes and brain farts.
Up front they weren't really all that great either. Iginla was far and away the best forward on the team, with Daymond Langkow a pretty clear no. 2 and Kristian Huselius no. 3, but past that was a jumble of players who really weren't much more than third-liners at best. Lots of mediocre players like Chuck Kobasew, Matthew Lombardi, and Shean Donovan filling out the middle six, with pretty good defensive guys like Stephane Yelle and Marcus Nilson slotted in there where they honestly didn't belong. Fourth liners were goons like Chris Simon and Darren McCarty.
The bench was short,
very short. On defence Hamrlik, Warrener and Regehr missed 66 games between them, and the gaps were filled with old-man Bryan Marchment, Robyn Regehr's little brother Ritchie, and cups of coffee from a decrepit Cale Hulse, Steve Montador and some kid named Giordano. Up front Huselius, Lombardi and centre Steve Reinprecht missed lots of time, pressing the likes of Jason Wiemer, Mike Leclerc, Jamie Lundmark and AHLer Craig MacDonald into service. Goaltending depth was laughable, with Kipper being backed up by Phil Sauve and an atrocious Brian Boucher.
Fast forward to the next year and Jim Playfair replaced Darryl Sutter as coach, and he employed a much more open strategy and style of play. Goal-scoring jumped quite a bit, but so too did goals against. Jordan Leopold was traded to Colorado for Alex Tanguay, adding much needed scoring punch but creating a gaping hole in the defensive corps. Leopold was replaced by Andrei Zyuzin, who wasn't much of a factor at either end of the ice and played bottom-pairing minutes. The team relied heavily on Phaneuf and Hamrlik, and Phaneuf had to rely heavily on Hamrlik to cover his poor positioning and decisions. Sutter acquired Brad Stuart from the Bruins, giving up Andrew Ference and Chuck Kobasew to do so, and it didn't substantially help. Up front Tanguay added another offensive weapon to the team but past that, again, the middle-six were quite barren. Matthew Lombardi had peaked as a 45-50 point player, and from there you had a hodge-podge of 'meh': old-and-busted Tony Amonte and Jeff Friesen, Jamie Lundmark, Dustin Boyd, David Moss... They weren't putting up much in the way of scoring and were terrrrrrrrrible liabilities otherwise.
The next year Mike Keenan comes in as coach and the team plays an even more fast and loose game. The once powerful defence is populated by the likes of Anders Eriksson and Jim Vandermeer. Cory Sarich is also brought in, but he's slow and essentially a poor man's carbon copy of Regehr. Iginla, Langkow, Tanguay and Huselius continue to be the only consistent offensive weapons, while the rest of the forward corps continues to consist of the likes of Lombardi, old-and-busted Craig Conroy and Owen Nolan, David Moss, Dustin Boyd, Eric Nystrom and Wayne Primeau. Curtis McElhinney began his long tenure as Kipper's seldom-used backup.
By '09-'10 things get desperate and Keenan is replaced by Darryl Sutter's brother Brent, who reinstitutes a tighter defensive game. Scoring correspondingly drops. They become a boring dump-and-chase team. Consistent scoring depth behind Iginla is non-existent; the team is reliant on terribly inconsistent players like Olli Jokinen, Curtis Glencross, Rene Bourque and Nigel Dawes. Dion Phaneuf's poor positioning and decision-making are finally jettisoned in a piss-poor trade for a smorgasbord of players the Flames didn't need, and Matt Stajan is put on the top line as the next contestant for "centre-who-has-chemistry-with-Iginla" (guess what? he doesn't); Jokinen gets the boot to the Rangers. Jay Bouwmeester, their biggest acquisition in the off-season, does not play Sutter's dump-and-chase game well and any semblance of the player he was in Florida is gone. Giordano, Bouwmeester and Regehr are the only half-way decent defencemen on the team; Sarich, Ian White and Adam Pardy round out the top six. Kipper was night-in-night-out the Flames' best player, keeping the team somewhat respectable in the standings.
In '10-'11 they mercifully put Stajan further down the lineup, but replace him with... Olli Jokinen.
Alex Tanguay is brought back too, and they bring in old'n'busted Brendan Morrison. The other players acquired in the trade for Phaneuf—Niklas Hagman and White—are tire fires. (Thankfully they let Jamal Mayers walk in the off-season.) Tanguay regains some of his past form with Iginla but neither Jokinen nor Morrison are "the answer" at centre on the top line. (Langkow is hurt all year, but hadn't been in top form for a couple years at that point anyway.) Bourque and Glencross continue to anchor a supremely inconsistent second line with boat anchors like Ales Kotalik and goons like Tom Kostopoulos and Tim Jackman dotting the rest of the lineup. On defence Bouwmeester quietly anchors a mediocre corps with Giordano (who was already the best defenceman on the team as of the year before), now very slow and ineffectual Regehr and Sarich, and Steve Staios and Anton Babchuk (whom they acquired for Ian White).
Brent Sutter continues to force the team to play a style that the players simply aren't good at playing (especially Bouwmeester) for the next couple seasons and Darryl Sutter continues to plug the holes in the lineup with players who are not really the solution to their problems. Giordano and Bouwmeester are the only good defencemen on the team; Regehr was traded to Buffalo for Chris Butler (who reeeeeeeeeeeeeally never merited the second-pairing minutes he got), and they're complemented with a very young T.J. Brodie, very old Scott Hannan, and very slow Cory Sarich. The forward depth gets even more shallow, with players like Lee Stempniak and Blake Comeau filling out the second line and a dog's breakfast of crap like Hagman, David Moss and Blair Jones the rest. Kipper playing god-mode can't save this team from ending up .500ish and just shy of a playoff berth.
'12-'13 was a tire-fire of a season. Bob Hartley replaced Brent Sutter and vets like Iginla, Kiprusoff and Tanguay clearly didn't want to be there anymore. In the 33 games under Hartley that Bouwmeester played it's the only time we see a shadow of the player he once was before coming to Calgary; in a panic move to get
something for him as they begin The Rebuild® new GM Jay Feaster offloads him to St. Louis for peanuts. The first forward line ends up consisting of Mike Cammalleri, Curtis Glencross and Lee Stempniak. (Yeesh!) New acquisitions like Jiri Hudler and Dennis Wideman seem alright, but "best-player-not-in-the-NHL" Roman Cervenka is a dud on arrival, and beyond Mikael Backlund the forward corps is garbage.
In retrospect it's almost miraculous how close they were to making the playoffs in 2010, '11 and '12, given how mediocre the team as a whole was. The difference-maker was Miikka Kiprusoff: they were
nothing without him. I don't mean to drag the "
Was Kiprusoff really as good as he was pegged?" thread into this, but in short: no...
... he was better.
