So having seen most of these teams a couple of times (on top of everything else we know, or think we know, about them), it looks a lot like there are five WC locks to make the playoffs: Canucks, Red Wings, Blackhawks, Blues, and Sharks.

I'm not about to put money down against the Preds, but they sure haven't looked like much against the Flames this season. Full respect to Daymond Langkow's Coyotes, and I think they have a fine chance, but it'll hardly be a smooth sail for them. And though I'm probably projecting the sins of last year's Stars on to this year's squad, it's still hard to love them much; a -7 differential, and -- c'mon -- 11 goals from Eric Nystrom.

On the Wild, I'm not sure I'd use Zona's inflammatory language, but they have not looked very good at all most times I've watched them. Part of that recently is them missing their best player (Koivu), but I didn't think much of them in their 3-0 win over the Flames last month either. Colorado, on the other hand, has actually looked not-too-bad, even though I've only watched them in losses to the Flames.

What it all adds up to is eight teams (I'll include the Oilers for karmic reasons) competing for three playoff spots. The Kings have the pedigree and the underlying numbers, so you probably have to like them for one of those spots, but really, the hockey gods could smile (or frown) on anyone.

*****

A propos of nothing -- really -- I'm enjoying being a Flames fan this season. It's too bad we're likely going to miss the playoffs for the 3rd straight season, and I'm not a big Feaster booster, and GAAAH have those losses to the Canucks been painful, but yeah. I'm having fun.

I'm a bit older, and our family has more things going on in the evenings, so I miss more games these days, and I certainly don't live & die with the team quite like I used to. This helps, I think! But really:

• Jarome Iginla is about to score his 500th goal, which will formally confirm him as the Greatest Flame Ever. He's still an excellent guy, fun to watch, and fun to cheer for.
• Kent Wilson and the folks at Flames Nation have created an absolute go-to blog that covers it all and provides a lot of insight.
• Rookies! The Flames were running three rookie defensemen for a while, on top of Roman Horak, and it still didn't seem as painful as any Anders Eriksson pairing. It's fun to watch these guys (generally) succeed; here's hoping they throw Irving to the wolves tonight and see what happens.
• Chris Butler has been a revelation, really, but it goes to show you just how good a player JayBo is. #4 is overpaid on account of the absence of O, but he is excellent. My least favorite thing right now is that he hasn't been to the playoffs, and has to bear the insinuations that this entails (not to mention that he's missing out on the excitement).
• Kevin Weekes seems to have been punted from the late HNiC game, so we never have to hear from him ever. TSN still does a great job broadcasting midweek hockey. And I hold out hope that Charlie Simmer may pick up mono or cat AIDS or something this Christmas season, and need a few months to recover.
• They still always beat the Oilers. You may laugh, but I now get excited to hear that Jordan Eberle has scored a slick goal; it signifies to me that things are still the same.

Merry Christmas, and Go Flames.

All of economics is devoted to the proposition that there is no such thing as a free lunch. All of politics is devoted to the opposite conviction. All economics teaches that you can't get something for nothing. All politics supposes that you can -- or that you can at least persuade other people that you can. Economics is about scarcity, universal and inescapable. Politics is about limitless plenty.

Consider that 98% of all bad policy amounts to nothing more than ignoring opportunity costs: the simple axiom that the cost of something is measured not just by the actual sum of money used to produce it, but what the same funds might have purchased, diverted to another end...

Word.

In what is, without a doubt, the best sonnet I've ever written about a traded hockey player (from this March 5, 2007 thread on CinO), I predicted Smyth would be reborn in Oil.  Nice to be right for a change.

Smytty Sonnet #94

So crude we drilled his heart, and crude distilled
Flowed from his eyes, tempered and dilute.
His labour deemed unskilled, instead rebuild
With cheaper lubricant that won't pollute. 

The Oilers' Brass elected to go green
With virgin teen unsoiled by stinking oil
To cap the well that burst them on the scene 
Return the heartland to its prairie soil

So riches of the north go down in flame
While southern Flames rise up like northern lights
Smyth's combustion heart enkindles shame, 
Though primed and set, no broken hearts ignite.

But! Baptismal fonts flow with oil refined,
And so, with oil, is Smyth's rebirth entwined.


Goil!
4-2 Oil (Smytty with the hattrick, assisted on all three by D-vo)

**Whoops: that should say Thru Mar.17, but I'm too lazy to fix it.

**If the Canucks can beat Phoenix tonight, it'll still be a 2-game spread between 4th and 10th; five get in and two do not. I'm petrified about this California trip that could obviously sink the Flames' season for good, but most of the other teams have some challenges in their schedule as well. I think if the Flames can even go 3/6 in Cali plus a win in Edmonton, then they're in OK shape. More than one reg.L vs ANA/LA/SJ, or (god forbid) a loss to the Oil next week, and they're in pretty terrible shape.

**Rick Nash this season is the same age as Jarome Iginla was in 2004. It's a serious bloody waste that Howson & friends haven't been able to build a decent group around him (yet) to take a couple runs. I know the hockey gods have frowned on the BJs for a few years now, but at the same time, they've done some pretty indefensible things with their money.

**I'm not sure what the proper order is, but Ottawa, Colorado, and Edmonton are definitely the three worst teams in the league. I hope the Islanders win the lottery as a reward for resembling an NHL team the past 2-3 months.

Go Flames.

So one of these days, I have a rant I need to post reminding the statzis that what they don't know could fill a warehouse, but the fact remains that if you just looked at Corsi numbers to predict a particular player's performance next month, you'd win a lot more than you lost.

I tweeted on December 24th (@FenwickMatt btw) the following:

How bad are the #Devils? The *best* of 1000 'simulations of remainder of season' gives them 70 points (worst = 34). http://bit.ly/5LHWmc

That projection/simulation is at Hockey-Reference.com, and with due congratulations to the man behind it for winning the TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown in both 2007 and 2008, it's useless. Ultra-useless. Somehow, a mathematical(?) model of an NHL team produced a result saying that the best of 1000 scenarios for the upcoming 48 games is that they would be 4 games over .500.

This shouldn't even pass the smell test for this year's post-apocalyptic version of the Oilers, let alone mine or anyone's smell test for the team that had the lowest SA/gm in the league. And yet it's on a really good hockey website. Puck Daddy is the most indispensable hockey blog, period, and yet they run an article every 2nd Thursday recommending someone who had a good +/- the last two weeks as the possible solution to your fantasy hockey +/- problems.

You can ignore the shot differential stuff if you like, but if you're actually interested in who's going to help your team tomorrow, ignore it at your peril. Unrelated, I hope Tambellini agrees with Jim Matheson that the Oilers need to find money for Ryan Jones, because this is totally different than Brule at the end of last year. Just because it's easy to like a player who's scoring goals doesn't mean that you won't like him when he's scoring fewer goals.

**It was with their win over Nashville on Sunday night that the Flames finally moved into a WC playoff spot by this measure. With a win tonight in Phoenix, they move into a tie for 4th. BONKERS. On the other hand, if they lose tonight and the Wild beat Nashville, they're back into 9th on tiebreakers.

**Would you say that the Toronto Maple Leafs are pretty close to being the best team in the league? No, not really? Me neither. I have nothing against the Maples per se, I just bring this up because they are 13 games behind the Canucks for best record in the NHL, and this 13 game spread is the same as the gulf between the Oilers and the Flames. So, naturally, the first random Oilers conversation I overheard after the Penner trade included the phrase, "Now we just need to get rid of Horcoff".

**Flames president Ken King is not perfect, and lord knows that the whole push for a new arena is headed to Calgary in short order, but I still like to think that he would die of shame before publishing a letter with an opening sentence like the one from Pat "Patrick" LaForge yesterday.

**Is someone going to stop Vancouver from winning the Stanley Cup? Please? This run the Flames have been on has been a lot of fun, but the stature of the Canucks is really casting a dark shadow over the season.

**"...Gordie Howe's professional career spanned 34 years, just 4 more than Hasek's to date." Wow.

**Go Flames. Watch out for Hanzal and Whitney.

**The Flames' standing continues to improve by this measure, even though they still haven't made it back into the top 8 at any point. They're closer to 4th place today than they were to 8th place on January 24th.

The bad news, such as it is, is that the schedule gets tougher when the calendar flips. It's not that bad opponent-wise, but they play 8 road games in March, and six of them are in back-to-backs -- and the Flames haven't played back-to-back on the road since before Christmas.

Fortunately, if they start to struggle, they have an ace-in-the-hole: the general manager can just head into the dressing room and ask the players to crank up the effort and intensity!

Homer: Um, are you guys working?
Programmer: Yes sir!
Homer: Can you, uh, work any harder?
Programmer: Sure thing boss! [keyboard clicking intensifies]

Darryl Katz is Hank Scorpio!

**I don't have much comment on today's trades, except that I'm becoming less and less impressed with Brian Burke all the time. It's not so much that I think he made a lot of bad moves the past week or so (he might well have made more good than bad), just that it's increasingly clear that he does not have a real overarching plan that informs his decisions day in and day out. These days I see him kind of like a long-time gambler at the track; he knows things about horses and horse racing that a casual fan or less experienced enthusiast doesn't even know there are to know, but has accumulated superstitions from ten thousand wins and losses too. In the end that gambler has to follow his gut -- there's no way to process all the information sensibly, and the results could be worse -- but there's sure no explaining his method to an onlooker.

**Also, Scott Reynolds nails the Avs-Sens goalie trade.

**I haven't loved Justin Bourne's stuff at Puck Daddy since he started, but man do I think he nailed "Why dealing players for picks is painful":

...if you ask me, when you're shivering in the cold, it makes a lot more sense to purchase a home with the foundation poured and the frame built than going out and buying a lot.

**I didn't get around to posting this until late, and tonight's out-of-town scoreboard was nice for a change! Minnesota and Anaheim are tied for 8th, 1/2 game up on the Flames. And the Hawks & BJs are T-11th, 1 game behind.

**As I recall the last Heritage Classic, Montreal won, and then the Alberta team's season went in the toilet. Let's not have history repeat itself, please. Go Flames.

With a win tonight over the Ducks, the Flames would move into a playoff spot even factoring in games-in-hand. I wouldn't have guessed it, though I was sure cheering for it. And I remain pretty pessimistic (in the superstitious sense), for now... I was sure they were going to lose to Chicago on Monday -- sure. I was pretty sure they were going to lose to Ottawa on Wednesday, especially after they went down 2-1. And right now I'm thinking Jeez, you could sure lose a ton of ground with back-to-back losses here, couldn't you!

They already miss Tanguay, and my God do they miss Daymond Langkow this season, but if the hockey gods are willing, they're certainly good enough to get into the playoffs and have some fun.

**I wouldn't bet a nickel of my own money on Dallas making the playoffs. Steinberg and Kent talked yesterday about the possibility of the bounces turning vicious on the Stars, but it's already happening. They're 1-5-1 in their last 7 (the W was vs. the Oilers, in a game where they were outshot 35-21, by the Oilers), and their cushion is pretty much gone. They host the 11th-place Blackhawks tonight, who they only lead by 3 games. If they lose, that's down to 2.

**So the distance between the 14th-place Avalanche and the top of the Western Conference is the same as the distance between the Oilers and the final playoff spot. The Oil has had some injuries this year but they've also had a lot go right, and some pleasant surprises.

I'm deeply disappointed and irritated that Taylor Hall looks like the real deal, and they have a lot of popcorn in the pot, but it can hardly be understated just how big a gap there is between where they are and where they hope to go.

**Haven't caught much Eastern Conference chatter lately -- are the Thrashers still in a slump, or are they just the same bad team that started the season 7-9-3 and then had one great month?

**Beating the Ducks would be the right result against the right opponent, and would be a hell of a relief before tomorrow evening's almost-certain L (I also wouldn't bet a nickel on holding off the Canucks PP again). Go Flames.

The Flames are this close to being right in the middle of the pack, with as good a chance as anyone for a 5-seed. But they aren't there.

**This Lowetide blurb from last week deserves a Word, or Amen:

The Memorial Cup, The CHL top prospects game and most of the Canadian NHL games are the only items Sportsnet has in their hockey arsenal at this point in time. Rogers must pay far less money, because the talent pool heavily favors tsn and whenever there's a raid it's SN talent headed to tsn not the other way around.

I'm okay with, don't care really. But I do wish Sportsnet at least tried to make their between period experts and their play by play men world class. The fact is that many of the American pbp guys are better than the current bunch who man the mics for RSN and that's a crying shame. No disrespect, these men worked hard to get where they are today and credit where due they made it. I do wish Rogers would at least respond to the challenge, though. Maybe upgrade here and there.

I'm not really OK with it. Yes, it pales next to the serious issues of the world, but the squads and the network want us watching 100+ hours a year of local team coverage, right? And not to put too fine a point on it, but the present on-air personnel makes me measurably less likely to do so.

Real talk: tanking is an idea that seems very poorly thought through by those who advocate it. And although I do oppose tanking on karmic grounds, I don’t think you need that mysticism in order to make the case against. In the specific case of the Flames, it seems all the more clear.

• There is very little chance that the org still believes that they’re just a couple complementary pieces away from greatness.
• There is very little chance that the org is happy with their “age profile”, or looking at trading away what little youth they have.
• The benefit to finishing 26th rather than 21st is pretty difficult to quantify, let alone get excited about.
• Watching a bad, overmatched team fighting for pride is a lot less fun than watching a mediocre team fighting for results.
• They need people to keep buying tickets. This is irrelevant if you’re a fan in Maryland or wherever, but there’s a segment of the fan base, including season ticket holders, whose support of a rebuild amounts to, “OK! See you when it’s done then!” If there’s no great evidence that in order to be great you must first be shitty – and there isn’t – then why put your fans through that?

Look, a guy can advocate change as a way of moving forward. I’m not saying Status Quo or Bust. I think trading Kipper, if possible, is a great idea, and it wouldn’t take much to get the fans on board. I’m warming to the idea of trading Regehr, mainly because I think the Flames can fill in the D more easily than the forward ranks. But “blow it all to smithereens” or the like makes no sense, and it’s too easy, and the payoff might not be there.

I hope the lads make the playoffs this season, even if they finish 8th and get swept by the Canucks. Well, by the Wings. I don’t see the downside, and it would sure make the next 3 months a lot more fun. Go Flames.

**In the 20 games preceding the weekend in Ontario, over which the Flames put up a 9-8-3 record, they outshot their opponents 623-507 and were outscored 57-51.

450 saves on 507 shots is .888, which is a pretty bloody lousy SV%. My LOL of the weekend was Eric Francis suggesting on the Hot Stove that trading Kiprusoff would be a good idea as a means of tanking. Weird - Francis was better than anyone at setting aside the Cult of Sutter to judge Darryl on his merits; he ought to be able to do the same for the Cult of Kipper.

**Here's how I imagine the conversation between Katz and Tambellini in mid-April after season's end, if Katz weren't too busy trying to get even richer in the land development business.

Katz: Well Steve, since your 2nd hiring in spring 2009, you've shown me that you can assemble a shitty team accidentally, and that you can assemble a shitty team deliberately. What do you plan to show me next? And please don't say something like, you can assemble a shitty team, while on rollerskates.

Tambellini: [silence while he assesses Katz' question]

**Go Flames

**So on December 13th, the Flames were 4 games out, and I said:

Their schedule for the next 10 games is about as favourable as you could hope for. If they can't make up more than half the gap between them and 8th by the time they head into Vancouver on January 5th, then maybe they are as bad as their record.

I guess they pretty much are. One thing that just struck me today that reinforces this: the big wins they had in October, the ones that showed us that the Flames would be a good team if they played right etc. etc., were agains Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Jose. Here in January, needless to say, no one's oohing and aahing over smiting these particular enemies.

**Now that I've been doing this standings format for a few years, there's a bit of data for year-to-year comparisons. Through January 2 this year, the Canucks were 16 games over .500 to lead the league. Through January 2 two years ago, both the Sharks and the Bruins were 24 games over .500.

**More on that: memory is funny, both in the "interesting" and the "ridiculous" sense. Your average Oiler fan around here (and by average I explicitly mean "not just the really stupid ones"), not to mention the local media, really believes that (1) the previous three seasons were lousy and hopeless on a persistent, game-to-game basis, and (2) right now represents a unique moment of hope and promise.

I think Tyler, Jon Willis, and many others have done a fine job expounding on the fact that young & promising does not necessarily lead to prime & successful. The other fallacy, though, tends to go mostly unaddressed: most unsuccessful teams seem a lot worse in retrospect than they do in the moment. Do you realize that the Oilers were alone in 7th place, 1.5 games up on 9th, on March 20, 2009? Of course you do - it's what made Steve Tambellini decide that adding Quinn and Khabibulin was a good idea. For rebuilding.

**"I've sat quiet and I've worked my (butt) off all year. I haven't said anything, while Arniel has gone to the media and said, basically, that I can't play. It gets to the point where I have to have some personal pride and I have to stand up for myself." -- Mike Commodore

Given where Scott Howson learned the hockey ops trade, I assume he's now searching for an ECHL team with which to place Mike Commodore.

**Good piece by Tom Benjamin this week. Naturally, I hope his season as a fan ends in wrenching heartbreak, but he's really eloquent regarding what it's all about. Which is also to say, Go Flames.

Well if Devils fans got an early Christmas present today, I suppose Flames fans are hoping for a Boxing Day Blowout. While I'm still afraid that the org would just install Jay Feaster as the new GM (let's have a proper search, please), I'm on the Darryl's Gotta Go bandwagon. Or rather, jogging behind it, seating's pretty cramped up there. Failure to achieve the objectives required by the position. I'm indifferent about Brent; even if he deserves to be replaced, he can't really do any harm if he sticks around until the end of the year (unlike Darryl, obviously).

For the record: the winner of the MSM employee most willing to criticize Darryl Sutter when things were going generally well is -- the eligible field was small -- Eric Francis! True story. If nonsense came out of the GM's mouth, E.F. was pretty much the only guy to call "Nonsense". Runner-up is Bruce Dowbiggin, although he really picked his spots, and also seemed more interested in shit-stirring than anything. (More interested in shit-stirring than Eric Francis? Yes.)

The Flames are better than their 15th-place standing, but they are not good. It looks like it's going to be a long season, with the possibility of The Greatest Flame being traded but a lot of turmoil regardless. (Obviously the guy they should be shopping hardest is Kipper.)

Today's other thought, that occurred to me watching the beginning of 24/7 last night: What would it take for Alexander Ovechkin's contract to become an anchor? I quite agree with everyone who says it's too early to panic, and the bounces aren't going his way, and whatnot. That said, we as sports fans and we as humans are incredibly biased to believe that the way things were yesterday and today are they way they'll be tomorrow, all historical evidence to the contrary.

We just naturally assume that Sidney Crosby will be a Hart Trophy nominee until he's 35, but how sure are you that on December 23, 2013, he'll be one of the top 3 players in the league? Things change! At age 24, Jeremy Roenick's offense dropped by 20% and never recovered. He was a nice player for quite a while, but when he was about 21, Don Cherry said he thought JR was the best player in the league. He never got glossed like that when he was 27.

Look, Ovechkin has been worth far more than he's been paid so far in his career; he's incredibly valuable to the Caps and to the league. But if your take is a blind, "Well of course he'll be an MVP-type 60-goal threat for the foreseeable future!", I would consider your extreme confidence to be misplaced.

Oh, and tonight in Dallas, Go Flames. I'm not a tanker.

**For the Flames, talk about hanging on by a thread. Their schedule for the next 10 games is about as favourable as you could hope for. If they can't make up more than half the gap between them and 8th by the time they head into Vancouver on January 5th, then maybe they are as bad as their record.

**I was in the building for Lightning-Flames this past Tuesday. For TeeBay, M. St. Louis was, as usual, the most noticeable player on a shift-by-shift basis. Stamkos didn't show too much, I didn't think. For the Flames, I left the ‘Dome more of a Jay Bouwmeester fan than I was when I entered. There seems to be a bit of consensus that he’s stepped up his game recently (approximately since getting hot(!) after the OTL in Detroit), but regardless: he’s very fast, he’s almost always in position, and he plays seemingly the whole game.

**I was sitting in the Avison Young Club, i.e. the premium lower bowl seats. Face value printed on my ticket: $252 + GST. A lot of fans are frustrated at the seemingly infinite patience of upper management for the fuckarounds of the Hockey Ops team, but I’m burstingly confident that this patience extends no further than the first day they seriously struggle to sell those puppies.

**George Johnson is getting lots of love for his blistering This Is Darryl’s Mess column yesterday. Yeah, I think he’s basically correct on most counts, but at the same time, it represents the two big problems with paid sports reporting (and columnizing). First: are all these problems actually new? If not, why didn’t you report on them before the team was in 15th place? And second is neatly captured by this paragraph:

As you'd expect, the tension around the Flames these days is thick and toxic. We've all heard the unsettling rumblings: Brent and Darryl aren't talking. Darryl and assistant GM Jay Feaster, a genial sort with an honest-to-goodness Stanley Cup ring who must wonder what on earth he's gotten himself into, aren't so much as making eye contact.

No, "we" have not all heard the unsettling rumblings. "We" are dependent on you to report unsettling rumblings, because we have no other way of knowing. Yet with very few exceptions, this stuff (i.e. stuff that would be of interest to readers/viewers, i.e. the only stuff that beat reporters can do better than bloggers) is only reported in the past tense, usually after (or right before) people are fired.

We're now doomed to constant speculation on Sutter job security until either Darryl is fired or the club rips off a long winning stretch. If someone out there in media-land is listening though, I think it'd be interesting to know whether the upper org sees Jay Feaster as an heir apparent, or as a straight assistant (and possibly interim) GM. The wisdom of firing Darryl mid-season hangs largely on the answer to this question, if you ask me, which you didn't, although you're still reading aren't you.

Go Flames.

Instant Update: from the Archives, here's another instance of George Johnson engaging in grave-dancing in lieu of something a bit more timely.