Calgary's failure, Julien's future and Maloney's firing (Puck Daddy Countdown)

(Ed. Note: The column formerly known as the Puck Daddy Power Rankings. Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.)

8. Harbingers of doom

Today, there is this:

Well, see ya later.

7. Failure

In summing up this season, in which his team finished 26th, Calgary Flames GM Brad Treliving put it pretty simply: “We failed.”

But here's what you have to keep in mind about the Flames in the first place: They were destined to be terrible this year. The possession numbers the last four years came about not due to lack of talent — the Flames actually have a good top-4 D corps and a solid top-6 forward group with game-breaking talent in both areas — but because Bob Hartley is one of the worst coaches in the league by a pretty considerable margin, and because they went into the season with 33-year-old Jonas Hiller and any-age-at-all Karri Ramo in net.

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If Treliving didn't see a disaster season coming a mile down the road, the biggest failure is on his part.

The Flames finished the year slightly improved in terms of possession numbers in comparison with last year's fluke of a season, but that seemed to be largely talent-driven. Treliving went out and acquired two players in Dougie Hamilton and Michael Frolik who move the needle in that way, and also had some solid depth talent like Jakub Nakladal come on late and further improve things.

Meanwhile, if you say 5-on-5 play can be talent-driven, you must also acknowledge special teams play largely cannot. Teams score on the power play and kill penalties effectively when they're well-coached, and ah jeez, the Flames were 22nd on the man advantage and dead last in penalty killing. That's on Hartley.

And as for being 30th in goals allowed, well, no one in their right mind would have advised re-signing Ramo for $3.8 million. The .909 save percentage you got out of him was probably just about right. And maybe you should have sold high on Hiller, who was pretty good last season, but an abysmal .879 this year. This could have very easily not been a problem for the Flames.

However, I suspect some of that goaltending incompetence is on Hartley as well. As a team they were .898 this season. Last year it was a roughly league-average .915. But the year before that, it was .902. And in 2012-13, it was .891. I don't know for sure, but it's almost like maybe not having any sort of rational defensive system in place over the last four seasons has generally led to bad goaltending. Who's to say?

Let's be clear: The Flames failed because Treliving failed to recognize structural problems with the team, somewhat in net but mainly behind the bench. He's already said neither goaltender will be back in a Flames uniform next year, but if he brings Hartley back for one more pass at an unequivocally bad tenure — and wastes another year of Mark Giordano's few remaining impactful seasons in the process — he should be out the door next summer as well. 

6. Dragging it out

Speaking of firing coaches, the inevitability of the Bruins firing Claude Julien is crushing.

I mean look, the players had their media availability already. Management did not, neither did the coach. That's because the coach is going to be fired for missing the playoffs (because he was given a defense consisting of 51-year-old Zdeno Chara, can-only-be-used-in-certain-situation Torey Krug, and a bunch of borderline AHLers).

So why not just fire the guy already? Why make everyone wait days on end? Not even the Senators did that. This isn't something over which you can even feign agonizing. You want him tossed out of TD Garden like the DJ Jazzy Jeff so you can replace him with, I don't know, Randy Carlyle or something.

Frankly it's rude to make the hockey world dangle this long, because the line to hire Claude Julien will be out the door and around the block. How can you expect Ottawa to make a coaching decision when they don't have the ability to speak with Julien (haha like they'd spend the money on that).

This is all just dumb and pointless. Which I guess fits in with a lot of the Bruins' decisions under Cam Neely anyway.

5. Not exactly being the world's greatest liar

Jim Benning held his end-of-season presser and didn't have himself that great of a day. First he said the team isn't rebuilding and the goal next year is to make the playoffs. Then he said there wasn't an opportunity for the team to trade Ryan Miller last summer.

And normally that wouldn't be noteworthy or anything like that, except, there's this: He said last summer at a team town hall meeting that they had offers for Ryan Miller.

Which, like, people were mad about at the time because they thought Ryan Miller was a huge waste of money this year (he was) and wouldn't be very good (he wasn't). So if you had the opportunity to offload him, then you should have taken it.

But now we obviously don't know what to believe. This is simply not a well-run team and a lot of evidence is piling up that Benning is in over his head. If you can't even keep your story straight here, it's tough to believe you can work your way out of the hole being dug. 

The Canucks are going to be awful next year because the Sedins will be a year older and no one on the roster is going to be appreciably better than they are now. And even if young players do improve, it's not enough to get you into the playoffs. Which is apparently the goal.

Just amazing, really.

4. Firing Don Maloney

Look, I get it. You're not very good, you don't seem to be getting better, so feel like you have to fire someone.

And Dave Tippett is widely — and correctly — considered a top coach in the game, so you can't fire him. And maybe you even want to start pinching your pennies just a little bit harder and trying to exploit just one or two extra market inefficiencies per year. So you bring in a new GM, who's going to focus on analytics.

Obviously I'm a guy who believes very much in that sort of thing and also believes that Maloney didn't exactly handle his business in a perfect manner when dealing with a shall we say tight budget down in the desert. But here's a question: If you're going to routinely be in the bottom-three in the league in cap hits, and you're carrying Chris Pronger's contract, and retaining salary on Keith Yandle, and bought out Mike Ribeiro just to get out of the absolute basement, how much better can you reasonably expect to do?

Mike Smith at $5.67 million is a huge mistake, no question about it. But other than that, are there any bad contracts on this bad team that's probably only bad because there's no serious financial commitment from ownership to be had?

On the other hand, if you were thinking about a change, this would have been the time to do it. The new GM will be able to shape the roster however he wants, because 17 (seventeen!) guys need new contracts next year. That includes RFA Louis Domingue, Klas Dahlbeck, Jarred Tinordi, Michael Stone, Connor Murphy, Tobias Rieder, Sergei Plotnikov, and Jiri Sekac.

If you want to bring Shane Doan back, you can. Same with Alex Tanguay, Boyd Gordon, Viktor Tikhonov, and Nick Grossmann. I mean, I wouldn't want to bring back any of those guys but you could is what I'm saying.

That's a lot of potential deck-clearing, and there's some serious talent coming into the club next year as well (Dylan Strome, etc.) so if you're really making things happen, maybe Maloney goes as well. 

It's really fair enough, I guess.

3. Making grand pronouncements

Here's something:

This from an owner who won't spend a rational amount of money to make the team actually competitive, with a roster that is simultaneously too costly for what it provides. 

If you're trying to imagine what this club looks like without Erik Karlsson buoying everything about it, it's not that hard. Give your local AHL team a visit. They were that literally bad this year with Karlsson off the ice.

2. Banning gifs

People know you can embed video on Twitter now, right?

1. Playoffs

Ahhhhhhhhh they start today ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes.

(Not ranked this week: Canadian whining.

Delicious.)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All statistics via War On Ice unless otherwise noted.)

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