**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.