1. Turn The Page<\/p>\n
Life moves fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Flames found that much out Thursday in their home-opening setback to the Kraken. But Friday, the club was focused on the future, one that consists of a busy, West Coast weekend that will see Calgary play back-to-back affairs tonight in Vancouver and tomorrow in Seattle.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The team held a full skate Friday morning at the Scotiabank Saddledome before jetting west to B.C. Just before departure, Joel Farabee pointed at those little moments – Seattle had two spells in Thursday’s game in which they scored twice inside a minute – as an area his group can improve upon.<\/p>\n
“I think with our team, we can’t have five, 10-minute mental lapses because teams are too good in this league,” said the forward, who will skate in his 499th career\u00a0NHL contest tonight. “It sucks, we disappointed our fans and everything like that, but just turn the page. We\u2019ve got a tough back-to-back here, so try and just focus on that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s the first game, so we have to be cognizant of it, but at the end of the day, we just got to keep playing aggressive. I think where we get in trouble is when we’re on our heels and trying to defend, instead of just putting pressure on guys and things like that.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We put together three to four categories that we wanted to make sure we improved on,” Flames Head Coach Ryan Huska added Friday. “We addressed it with the players, and now we move on.<\/p>\n
“And I think that’s the best way to approach it after you have a night like we had (Thursday), is you deal with it, you make sure we’re better for it, and now we’re looking forward to what’s coming up (Saturday).”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Huska’s defensive pairings had a bit of a different feel Friday morning, notably the reunification of Kevin Bahl and Zach Whitecloud on one unit, while veteran Joel Hanley took on duties alongside Simon Nemec.<\/p>\n
And should they end up playing together against the Canucks, Bahl and Whitecloud already have some built-in chemistry. The pair actually logged the third-most ice-time of any Calgary duo at 5-on-5 during the 2025-26 campaign, impressive given that\u00a0Whitecloud wasn’t acquired by the Flames until mid-January.<\/p>\n
Their on-ice save percentage of .924 was also the third-highest figure of any Calgary pairing that spent more than 50 minutes together at 5-on-5 last season (according to Natural Stat Trick).<\/p>\n
But for Huska, the lessons from Thursday’s loss have been relayed. We’ll get a better sense of any lineup adjustments once the team hits the ice at Rogers Arena for morning skate.<\/p>\n
But everyone in the dressing room is eager to put their best feet (or skates) forward in this, their 2026-27 road opener.<\/p>\n
“We went out and had a good skate today,” Huska said. “So I think the focus for us now is looking forward to what’s coming, and that’s the first road game in Vancouver.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"1. Turn The Page Life moves fast.\u00a0 The Flames found that much out Thursday in their home-opening setback…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":919292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194293],"tags":[49,2798,48],"class_list":["post-919291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-calgary","tag-ca","tag-calgary","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919291","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=919291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}