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Washington Capitals 2015 Opponents: Calgary Flames

By Ben Eisenberg

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Mandatory Credit: Kelvin Kuo-USA TODAY Sports

The Washington Capitals and Calgary Flames should both be playoff contenders in 2015

The Washington Capitals and Calgary Flames both improved their teams over the off-season. They both made one free agency splash (Justin Williams for the Caps and Michael Frolik for Calgary) and one huge trade (T.J. Oshie and Dougie Hamilton).

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The Washington Capitals went 1-0-1 against the Flames last season. On October 25th, the Washington Capitals doused the Flames at Calgary 3-1 thanks to strong performances from Joel Ward and Braden Holtby. A couple weeks later the Flames returned the favor in DC, downing the Washington Capitals 4-3 on the heels of Sean Monahan’s overtime game-winner.

This season, the Washington Capitals and Flames meet twice this year, once in Calgary on October 20th then back at Verizon Center on November 13th.

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The Flames were the surprise story of the 2014-2015 season, exceeding expectations perhaps more so than any other NHL team. Entering the season they were supposed to be a team on a rebuilding track, and instead they ended up going all the way to the second round of the playoffs. Sure, they were stamped out by the Ducks in the second round, but the Cinderella season was enough to earn Bob Hartley the Jack Adams award for the best coach of the year.

Calgary, though, was no darling of the analytics crowd. Their 44.5% Corsi-For in even strength situations was third worst in the league ahead of just Colorado and Buffalo. They finished the year with a goal differential of -18.

Their big offseason splash was trading for rising star defenseman Dougie Hamilton. General Manager Brad Treviling acquired the blue-liner for their 2015 first rounder and two second round draft picks.

Hamilton will join an already stalwart group of D that includes T.J. Brodie and Mark Giordano, who returns from an injury that shortened his Norris-trophy caliber season. Bolstering that depth are Dennis Wideman and Kris Russell will also help fill out one of the better defenses in the NHL.

Up front, Monahan and Johnny Gaudreau made names for themselves last year and will be expected to shoulder much of the load on offense again. The Flames added Michael Frolik, who has always been a good possession player, to bolster their depth.

Cat Silverman, who writes for Nation Network about the Pacific Division. and is a development coach with the Arizona Coyotes, weighs in on the Flames for us here:

"The Flames had possession issues last year, and that indicates a certain amount of luck needed to get as far as they did. A couple things should keep them from regressing much, though, if at all — and that’s the addition of a couple strong possession players and the inability of basic possession stats to factor for shot quality.The Flames added both Dougie Hamilton and Michael Frolik in the off-season…Both were strong possession players last year, and it’s likely that they’ll factor into the ability of the team to see their possession stats go up without much issue.Outside of that, though, the team’s zone entries were a big problem — but their shooting quality certainly wasn’t, which indicates that there isn’t likely to be as much offensive regression as there would be if it was just luck-based winning that we saw last year.Matchsticks and Gasoline’s Ari and Mike Fail both talked quite a bit this summer about how possession drivers like Mikael Backlund were paired with poor possession players like Lance Bouma, which makes it more plausible that what the team saw happen last year is still repeatable.There will still need to be a certain level of offensive maintenance from players like Bouma and Josh Jooris, both of whom exceeded expectations, but it doesn’t seem too unrealistic to assume that last year’s data is repeatable.The team that Calgary is most often compared to as a cautionary tale is the Colorado Avalanche, who saw luck-driven success in 2013-2014 and collapsed in 2014-2015 when their poor possession numbers and high PDO caught up to them.Where the Avalanche did nothing to really address their generally weak defense, though, the Flames actually did improve (with the add of Hamilton). There’s also the consideration of what happens in net — when comparing Semyon Varlamov and Jonas Hiller, there’s a lot that Calgary has going for it that Colorado didn’t.Hiller plays a much safer, tracking-heavy game than Varlamov, whose butterfly-first method of play has a higher injury rate. Sure enough, he spent half the season injured; the expected success rate for Hiller also points to a lower level of regression than the Avalanche saw in their own post-success campaign."

Overall, the Flames have a slightly better defense than the Washington Capitals, on the strength of Giordano and Brodie who are both absolute studs. But it’s not that large of a gap, as the Washington Capitals have solid 1-6 depth on their blue line.

Meanwhile, the Washington Capitals forward depth and high-end talent beats that of Calgary. The off-season additions of Justin Williams and T.J. Oshie made a huge difference. Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom are more established than either Gaudreau or Monahan and as of now are on a different level than them.

In goal, I’d give Braden Holtby a slight edge over Jonas Hiller of the Flames, although it’s not a huge mismatch.

The kicker is that the Washington Capitals are a much better possession team and should be able to use that to their advantage against a Flames team that may or may not be able to repeat last season’s success. If Calgary can fix their possession problems, they could be a legit contender. However, are their moves enough to fix that huge issue?

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