Hunter Brzustewicz<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cThat\u2019s a tough one for him after travel, just finishing off with his team, coming in and not being around our group until this morning and I think he handled himself just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who could have predicted at the beginning of the season that in Game 79, the Flames\u2019 blue line would include just two defencemen who played for them last year?<\/p>\n
Other than Parekh and Brzustewicz \u2014 who both played one game for the Flames last year \u2014 the rest of the backenders all played elsewhere last season, including Whitecloud, Olli Maatta and Wiebe, who were all acquired late this season.<\/p>\n
Kuznetsov spent all last season in the minors.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mainstays Kevin Bahl and Joel Hanley are both injured.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s loss was a big win for the organization, as a victory over Seattle would have given the Flames a fighting chance to surpass the Kraken in the standings.<\/p>\n
Instead, the Kraken are now six points up, which makes them hard to catch, as the Flames have just three games left.<\/p>\n
Vancouver has clinched 32nd\u00a0in the standings and Chicago is 31st\u00a0with 70 points and two games left. The Flames are at 73 points and could break some hearts if they catch the Rangers (75 points, with two games left), or the Leafs (78, with two games left).<\/p>\n
Next up for the Flames is a visit from Utah on Sunday, followed by home games against first-place Colorado and a desperate Los Angeles club, which might very well require a win on the last night of the season to get into the playoffs.<\/p>\n
Sharangovich-Backlund-Coronato
Farabee-Frost-Gridin
Coleman-Strome-Suniev
Zary-Gross-Pospisil\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kuznetsov-Whitecloud
Maatta-Brzustewicz
Wiebe-Parekh<\/p>\n
Cooley\u00a0
Wolf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His mother fought back tears during his rookie lap, as a crew of almost 60 friends and family…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-598648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598648","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=598648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}