Time to point the finger at Darryl Sutter for Calgary Flames’ lost season

Credit: Darryl Sutter (© Sergei Belski-USA TODAY Sports)

Which is the more painful conclusion to a nightmare that began on July 13, 2022? A decimated franchise, out of contention in October, unable to compete after losing its two superstars…or a long, bumpy, mediocre season, ended by a friggin’ shootout loss in Game 81?

The latter result has to be a chalky pill for Calgary Flames fans to choke down. They felt the anguish of watching Johnny Gaudreau sign with the Columbus Blue Jackets and Matthew Tkachuk force his way out of town via trade, months after they led the team to a Pacific Division title. They experienced the surge of optimism when GM Brad Treliving went out and got Jonathan Huberdeau and MacKenzie Weegar in the Tkachuk blockbuster and signed Stanley Cup winner Nazem Kadri. If you stared at the 2022-23 roster in the right light leading up to opening night, it almost looked better than the previous season’s team.

And then…woof. A grind of a season, filled with deflating moments: Huberdeau failing to find his game pretty much from Day 1, coming off a 115-point season, limping to a truly staggering 55 points in 78 games; goaltender Jacob Markstrom carrying his 2022 playoff implosion into pretty much a year-long implosion; top-four defenseman Oliver Kylington missing the entire season on personal leave due to a family issue; blueliner Rasmus Andersson getting hit by a car during a road trip; how about relying on the lumbering Nick Ritchie in the season-ending shootout Monday night? Take your pick.

So where does the blame go for a team that was all-in on Stanley Cup contention this season and couldn’t even walk away with a Wildcard playoff berth?

I wouldn’t rush to blame the architect, Treliving. So much of the season was out of his control. He couldn’t stop Gaudreau from departing for a city that better suited his wife’s career. And if Tkachuk no longer wanted to play in Calgary, Treliving’s hands were tied. He couldn’t have anticipated Kylington’s off-ice situation, nor that Markstrom would go from Vezina Trophy runner-up to below average. No one in their right mind could’ve predicted Huberdeau would go from a season in which he set an NHL record for assists by a left winger to recording less than half his 2021-22 point total in his first year as a Flame. From where I stand, Treliving put what looked like a competitive team on the ice for 2022-23, and it simply didn’t perform.

Where does my finger aim? I look at a team has lost 30 one-goal games this season and won a paltry 30 games in regulation, relying on a whopping 17 loser points to prop up its record. I look at a team that ices the NHL’s 21^st best power play; a team that has given Huberdeau the 143^rd most ice time per game among NHL forwards and often inexplicably played him on his wrong wing; a team that refused to give youngsters like Matthew Phillips a fair chance to provide a meaningful spark.

I look behind the bench at Darryl Sutter.

Tracing the history of taskmaster coaches, from Mike Keenan to John Tortorella, we know they have a shelf life. Their hard-ass schtick can work well at first, cleaning up a room that has lost its competitive fire, and often yields impressive early results. Sutter took home the Jack Adams Award in 2021-22, his first full season since rejoining the Flames as their bench boss. But I’ll always remember what Los Angeles Kings Drew Doughty told me in summer 2017 following Sutter’s ousting as their head coach.

“Darryl’s an awesome coach, and I absolutely love him,” Doughty said at the time. “He’s awesome for me. He taught me a lot of things as well. But if there is a problem with the team, or if you had a problem with Darryl, you’d be intimidated to go knock on his door and say, ‘Hey Darryl, I don’t like this or I don’t like that.’ ”

It always stuck with me. Sutter puts up a wall between himself and his players. Hey, that’s not always a bad thing. Making yourself the enemy can galvanize your players. It famously worked for Herb Brooks and the 1980 Miracle on Ice team, right? But it can only work for so long. The adversarial relationship with the coach can begin to poison the team. Especially when the coach begins calling out his players in public, as Sutter has been known to do repeatedly during his career. He most notably did it with Huberdeau in November, indicating the star left winger was a “work in progress” who “needed to speed his game up.”

And so began a season of tense post-game comments between coach and player(s) and rumors swirling about friction in the dressing room.

Huberdeau’s agent, Allan Walsh, tweeted in February that “negativity sucks the joy out of players.” And reports emerged in March that Kadri’s blunt nature bumped up against Sutter’s alpha-dog mentality. Tyler Toffoli spoke out in support of his coach, with whom he won a Stanley Cup in 2014, and that implied players might have been taking sides in a divided room.

Whatever was happening behind closed doors in Calgary, it yielded a team that didn’t have the pushback to persevere in clutch situations. The Flames are an embarrassing 7-17 in overtime or shootout games this season. During the critical stretch run, they lost a head scratching game at home to the brazenly tanking Chicago Blackhawks last week. A team that quits like that has clearly quit on its coach. And it’s time for Treliving to quit on Sutter.

It’s especially important to do so because there is plenty to salvage in Calgary for next season. Weegar, Kadri and Huberdeau just signed long-term deals paying them through 2030-31, 2028-29 and 2030-31, respectively. Andrew Mangiapane has two seasons left after this one. Andersson has three left. Meanwhile, Mikael Backlund, Elias Lindholm, Toffoli and Noah Hanifin enter their UFA walk years. The Flames could extend some players from that group this summer, of course, but it’s still possible they go into 2023-24 with several prominent pending 2024 UFAs. That means next season has potential to be a last ride for the Treliving regime.

Until then, though: the Flames need a new voice that can uplift a team that isn’t short on veteran talent, perhaps a voice that can give larger opportunities to the team’s prospects, too, from Matt Coronato to Jakob Pelletier to Connor Zary. We can’t say for certain that Treliving has failed with this group until we see how it responds with a different coach. That’s why Sutter needs to go. Now.

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Time to point the finger at Darryl Sutter for Calgary Flames’ lost season

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