The view from Calgary

The Calgary Flames sit in 10th place in the Western Conference with 85 points, same as eighth-place Anaheim and ninth-place Dallas, but there’s a term that is haunting the Flames right now: games in hand. The Flames have already played 75 games, while the Ducks and Stars have played only 72. If you believe it will take 96 points to make the playoffs, the Flames would need no worse than a 5-1-1 finish. That’s far from impossible, but given that the Flames are 1-3-2 in their last seven, it also wouldn’t be considered highly probable. The Kings sit in fifth place this morning, with 88 points, two ahead of sixth-place Chicago (which has one game in hand) and seventh-place Nashville and one point behind Phoenix, which has played one more game and plays again tonight. Here’s a sampling of how last night’s Kings-Flames game was covered by the Calgary media, followed by some additional quotes from the Flames’ locker room…

Flames fail to find winning script in L.A. (Calgary Herald)

Terrible Los (Calgary Sun)

COACH BRENT SUTTER
(on the game…) “It was a hard-fought game. It was like a Game 7 playoff; you can’t ask for any more than that. Obviously it’s important that we try to get two points, but the effort was there, we did a lot of really good things here tonight, and we come up a little bit short. It gets to a shootout again, but I’m proud of how hard the guys fought and how hard they battled here.”

(on the schedule…) “You can’t do anything about the schedule. It’s the games in hand some teams have. It’s obviously, you know, (you) wish it wasn’t the case for a hockey team, with teams sitting with two, three games in hand on us. But you can’t do anything about it. Your schedule is your schedule and we’ve got to find a way to get a win in San Jose .”

(on the two goalies…) “Kipper [Mikka Kiprusoff] was outstanding, and their goalie made some big saves too. One power play, we hit two posts and it was just one of those nights where you knew it was going to be a tight game right from the start to the finish, and that’s what it was.”

STEVE STAIOS
(on coming back from the loss…) “I think we’ll battle past it. I think (with) what we’ve been through in the last few months, we know we’ve just got to keep our heads down and keep working hard, and we believe that we’re going to be there in the end. So as disappointing as it is tonight, losing in the shootout, I think we’ll be ready for the next game and we feel confident in our group and we’re just going to keep pushing forward.”

JAROME IGINLA
(on the game…) “Guys played hard. We played well, back-to-back. It was a good game, everyone was here to play and that’s on both sides. The Kings played hard too. Both goalies played great. We had some good chances, hit a few posts, could have went in but you go to a shootout (and) anything can happen. The guys played hard and we’d love to get two (points), but we know in our remaining games we’re going to have to win a ton of them. So we’ve got to keep our heads up and (if) we play like that, especially on back-to-backs, we’ll win most nights.”

(on the power-play chances…) “They played hard too, they blocked a lot of shots. Our PK played very well and blocked a lot of shots. PP-wise, on another night, yeah, we feel (if) we move it like that, we get three goals. We hit at least two posts, maybe three on it… but we feel like if we get enough of them, the next one’s in.”