{"id":216780,"date":"2025-10-16T07:39:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T07:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/216780\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T07:39:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T07:39:08","slug":"flames-takeaways-cooley-solid-offence-struggles-in-loss-to-mammoth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/216780\/","title":{"rendered":"Flames Takeaways: Cooley solid, offence struggles in loss to Mammoth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turns out backup goaltending is the least of the Calgary Flames<\/a>‘ concerns right now.<\/p>\n

In the most important start of his career, Devin Cooley<\/a> made an overwhelmingly positive first impression with a 29-save performance that made him the game\u2019s first star Wednesday in Utah.<\/p>\n

However, his heroics weren\u2019t enough as the offensively-challenged Flames lost their fourth in a row, this time by a 3-1 score to the Mammoth.<\/p>\n

And while the effort was solid, the reality is becoming daunting, warned coach Ryan Huska afterwards.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to find your game in a hurry because you can\u2019t make the playoffs the first month of the year, but you surely can miss them,\u201d said Huska, whose club played in Calgary the night before and arrived at their Salt Lake City hotel after 3 a.m.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important for guys to recognize the work is there, but it\u2019s some of the execution that\u2019s not, or the mistake at an inopportune time that is costing us some of these games.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat stuff has to be cleaned up. I do feel we\u2019ve beaten ourselves in this stretch we\u2019re in right now. Those are all things I think are correctable for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the nightmarish second half he had in the AHL last season, followed by a subpar pre-season, plenty was riding on Cooley\u2019s opening performance.<\/p>\n

With rumours abounding the Flames are already looking to bolster their backup position, the 28-year-old responded to the pressure by being the game\u2019s first star, keeping Calgary in a game that could easily have gotten out of hand without him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought for his first game of the year I thought he was excellent,\u201d said Huska, who will need Dustion Wolf\u2019s backup to win at least half his starts for the team to make the playoffs.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe made the saves he had to, and he sprinkled in some that were competitive saves, and that\u2019s what you want to see from him.\u201d
Making just his seventh NHL start, Cooley\u2019s first NHL action in 18 months saw him make a trio of great saves in the first period that gave plenty of early hope he was up to the task.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt pretty good, maybe a little jumpy, a little scrambly, but maybe that comes with not playing in a while and having a lot of energy and feeling excited to have an opportunity,\u201d said the California native, who was an AHL all-star last season.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEspecially in a backup role, my job is to give the team a chance every single night I\u2019m in, whether it\u2019s a tough travel day or whatever, I\u2019ve got to find a way to dig in.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did. And his teammates did well to scrap their way through a tight game, despite the obvious fatigue that comes from playing their second back-to-back in eight days.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought our guys battled really hard,\u201d said Cooley.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we got in at 3:30 or 4 in the morning on a back-to-back, so it wasn\u2019t easy, but our guys battled to the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

With just six goals in their last four games, the Flames\u2019 inability to finish continues to plague a franchise that missed the playoffs last season because of it.<\/p>\n

Joel Farabee<\/a> and Matt Coronato<\/a> were the most dangerous of all Flames Wednesday, as they pushed hard in the third period to erase a one-goal deficit, outshooting the hosts 12-4.<\/p>\n

But shortly after Karel Vejmelka made a crucial shoulder save on Nazem Kadri in the final minute, the door opened for Kevin Stenlund to bank a lucky clearing attempt into an empty net after banked it in off the side boards.<\/p>\n

Fact is, scoring is hard enough for the Flames without having to kill six Utah power plays.<\/p>\n

Full marks to the revamped penalty kill approach and personnel the Flames employ for being perfect on the night, but it makes it awfully tough to come back in a game when you\u2019re constantly down a man.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a hard game to win when you take six minors,\u201d said Rasmus Andersson, whose power-play goal in the first period came courtesy of a fortuitous rebound off a defender.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe penalties cost us tonight, I thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huska didn\u2019t disagree, pointing to a second-period lapse in which the Flames were outshot 18-3 and outscored 2-0 while having to kill off three penalties.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we were killing that many penalties, I don\u2019t think we got out of our zone the whole period,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen you\u2019re making fatigue mistakes more than anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of those mistakes saw Zayne Parekh fail to close a gap at mid ice and lose a footrace to JJ Peterka, whose breakaway conversion stood as the winner.<\/p>\n

The Flames visit Vegas on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Turns out backup goaltending is the least of the Calgary Flames‘ concerns right now. In the most important…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-216780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}