'Time to Get it Going'

We’re officially in the home stretch now.

Sure, some key battles remain – and those on the bubble will have another chance (or two) to make an impression before the horn sounds later this week.

For everyone else?

There's no mistaking what a stacked Flames team is looking to accomplish tonight as we begin to wind down the exhibition slate.

“You look at our roster that we're dressing today, and we want to get to the point where we're starting to see the pace and the tempo that the team has to play with,” said Head Coach Ryan Huska. “We want to see the habits that we expect them to play with.

“You fully understand that this is the team of year where players are getting their game going.

“But now's the time to get it going.”

That goes for everyone.

The Flames will be icing a star-studded lineup that features Elias Lindholm, Jonathan Huberdeau, Rasmus Andersson, MacKenzie Weegar and starting puck-stopper Jacob Markstrom. In fact, of the 20 skaters in line to play tonight, only Matt Coronato, Cole Schwindt and Dryden Hunt did not play in The Show last year, aside from Hunt’s nine games with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Expectations are understandably high, especially with the Winnipeg Jets bringing a greener troupe that got even younger this morning with the news that Mark Scheifele and Morgan Barron would skip the proceedings thanks to an illness coursing through the visitors' dressing room.

Brad Lambert and Dominic Toninato have been recalled from the Manitoba Moose, as a result.

But regardless of the opponent, the Flames need play true to their identity tonight, which – by virtue of their 24 turnovers at the offensive blueline – was missing in a 2-1 overtime loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Friday.

“I think we're a fast team with the way our guys think it,” Huska explained. “We may not have burners. You would classify Dillon Dube as a guy that can burn. He can really skate. So, we may not have a ton of guys that are in Dillon's category, but a lot of playing fast is mindset. The game against Edmonton? Our d-men were slow. Not their feet, necessarily, but the way they moved the puck. When you see our team in particular going D-to-D all the time, they're slow.

“That's what we're trying to get them to understand and a lot of that is mindset.”

The game before, in Winnipeg?

“It was very evident how hard the young guys worked,” Huska said of that shootout victory. “That’s what we need out of everybody. They were skating and they were pressuring, and they were forcing people into mistakes.

“You have to have the mindset that we will make it difficult on teams so they'll have no room on the ice.

“We want to see a lot more of that tonight.”

Part of that is understanding – and properly executing – the Flames’ new defensive structure.

While so much has been made about the system and how it's aimed to reduce those ‘catastrophic’ defensive breakdowns, a big reason for the shift was to help kickstart the transition, too. The ‘zone’ defence (vs. man-on-man) is a little more passive, at times, but when you create layers of support to help to kill plays defensively, those same layers will have the green light to move up as a unit and support the attack off the rush.

“We feel that one of the strengths of our team is our backend and their ability to skate, their ability to move the puck and their ability to see the game,” Huska said. “We want to give them that (freedom) but they have to understand the situations, too.”

And that’s getting a big thumbs-up from the Flames’ D corps.

“There are a lot of fast guys in the room, but a big thing is moving the puck fast and creating that speed,” said MacKenzie Weegar. “As D men, you want to get the puck up to the forwards as fast as you can and get them going north. ... There's a lot of guys in our room that want to play fast or catch guys on a bad change, or catch guys sleeping or being lazy. For us, that's what it's about – getting pucks as fast as we can to those forwards and create that speed.

“There's no one guy that wants to be a true stay-at-home D man. We can all play D back there. We all know how to play good, solid D. But everyone wants to get up there and create some offence. I think, especially in our division, we have a lot of teams that can score goals and generate a lot of offence, so we've got to compete with those teams.”