Flames Fiddle while Nashville Burns

“You’re up 3-2 at home, you’ve got to win, bottom line. We played a team here that’s been playing some pretty good hockey. We had an opportunity to win tonight and we let it get by us because of some mistakes. We made some turnovers that you can’t make.” – coach Brent Sutter

The Nashville Predators remembered with precise clarity the licking the Flames laid on them on the last day of November. On that evening, Calgary crushed the Predators 5-0 in Music City, a thrashing that was less than harmonious to coach Barry Trotz and his choir of charges. On Saturday afternoon, his club would sing a sweeter song.

On the positive side of the game ledger, it looked like a dominating performance by the Calgary Flames in their afternoon tilt with the Nashville Predators at the Saddledome. Jarome Iginla broke out of his lengthy slump, scoring a brace of goals, his first markers of the month. The Flames outshot their Music City opponent by a healthy margin, held the opposition to only 20 shots, many from the fringes of the play and the team dominated the face-off circle – a rare commodity.

Unfortunately, only one item on the stat sheet tells the true tale of the tape – and that’s the score. And on this day, it was notched in the favor of the Nashville Predators, who played the home side like a badly tuned fiddle and doused the Flames by a 5-3 count.

So why did they lose when, on paper at least, they held the upper hand? The goaltending was mediocre – a rare sub-par performance from Kipper the Keeper proving once again just how valuable he is to the success of the club. They played soft in the corners and missed too many assignments in front of the net. They allowed Nashville to build an early 2-0 lead, played with energy and enthusiasm to battle back to tie and eventually take a 3-2 lead, then sat back and relaxed, allowing the Predators to dictate the ebb and flow of the match.

After the commanding physical pounding the Flames laid on the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday evening produced a workmanlike, Sutter-styled 2-1 victory, it was expected the club would bring a similar approach to the table during their meeting with the Predators. Instead, the Flames treated their opposition with ladylike grace, shying away from the battles along the boards, coughing up the puck like a phlegm-filled, flu-ridden outpatient and playing with tentative tension instead of confident cockiness.

Calgary didn’t deserve to win. They didn’t.