It's been a while

Not looking good.

I'm not convinced the Flames are entirely prepared for this next upcoming game. The opposition has been talking trash, and yeah, our guys might not be able to step up.

Mind you, they've all been retired for quite some time, and being all musicians, the opposition is famed for putting together words rather than action.

Will Lanny, Vernie, and the rest of the Flames (circa '89, plus a few guests) be able to take on a bunch of musicians? Who knows?

As for the real Flames, I am just going to consider yesterday's game an abomination, and maybe just leave it at that. Unfortunately, that seems to be their MO lately. I have a couple of theories, but nothing terribly conclusive.

Iggy, Iggy, Iggy: See, when Iggy gets close to a milestone, the team always falls apart. I'll point to when he was chasing Fleury's record for most goals scored by a Flame earlier this year. I'll point to any game where he's scored two goals, with time to spare. I don't know that it's Iginla specifically who encourages this, but the rest of the team has a tendency to pass up perfectly reasonable scoring chances in an effort to set it up. Now, it's lovely that they love him so much, but yeah... they need to be more selfish and just get 'er in.

Hungry? Too bad about too many cooks: The other thing is that the team is aging, slowly and surely. Dave, in the past weeks, has had heated debates with fans of other teams, where he has been able to promote as a real feature of the team that we have so many established veterans. Now, this is great in terms of leadership, blah, blah, but that means also that maybe there's conflicting messages out there in the dressing room.

Also, teams that are young are hungry. Teams that haven't been to the big show for some time are hungry. Teams that know they're more or less going to make it to the bonus round and who have done it for a while... not so hungry. One of the key drivers behind the Cup run in 2004 surely must have been hunger. And now, we're playing our fourth playoffs in a row(ish), the guys are older, and yeah... the league is full of youth right now. Hungry, eager youth who want to see what the playoffs are all about. 'Nuff said.

I am right now going to write off tomorrow night's game... not only does it matter, I wouldn't be surprised if our current trend continues. If weird things happen and we pair up with the Wild, however, we've just pooched ourselves by not going out and squashing them. We had a chance to send them a message about how the playoffs are gonna work, and muffed it.

Sigh.

So, I figure the geezers will beat the rockers tonight by a score of 13.6 to 9.79, and yeah. Don't hold your breath tomorrow.

Go Flames!