The Calgary Flames NEED him now...

The Calgary Flames underwent an absolute disaster a couple nights ago, especially with unconsciously stellar goaltender Devin Cooley going down with an injury. Well, now the Flames need Dustin Wolf to step up and emerge back into the number one goalie everyone expects him to be. We're going to get to all that more in this video, but first I want to welcome you to Flames Digest. I'm Mark Griffith. If you're new around here and you love the Flames, make sure to subscribe so you can stay up to date on all the latest news, updates, reports, and rumors revolving around your Calgary Flames. We would love to welcome Welcome to the Flames Digest family. We have a lot of injury news, and most of it has to do with the with the goalies as we have quite a bit of goalie news here. I know I'm not super expressive once again as you can tell I'm recording at work so try to be a little bit more quiet because people get a little concerned when I'm just screaming at my laptop for you know 10-15 minutes in a row here but let's start off with the goalie news. So Um, here we go. I kind of spoil a bit of a, an update there, but Ryan Huska, obviously talking after the game against the Oilers said he had no update on Cooley's lower body injury, but don't worry. I'll get into one in just a second here. Uh, he just talked to the trainer during the first intermission. So the call was made then to remove him from the game. If you missed that game, you know, Cooley played the first gave up a goal and then Dustin Wolf went in and, uh, you know, All of the happiness was kind of sucked out of the Flames season for the rest of that game. Kind of why I didn't make a video yesterday. But we do have an update as of literally this morning, at the time of recording. This just happened a few minutes ago. But Calgary has placed Devin Cooley on IR with a lower body injury. Not exactly fantastic news. It almost seemed like no one would be going on IR because Brendan Hoffman got hurt as well. I actually don't have an update on him. But there is also news from the AHL Wranglers as Connor Zary has had knee surgery and is now considered week to week. So someone who's already been labeled as, you know, made of glass, which I know is a harsh kind of saying to say to someone who gets injured a lot. But once again, Has another knee injury and it's just not looking great for him. Hopefully he has a good, you know, ending to his storyline, to his storybook. But it kind of looks like his career is in jeopardy a little bit here. So you do got to feel for the guy there. But the main thing here, of course, is that Cooley is on IR. So he's been, you know, the brightest spot of the Flames season so far. The Flames best player for sure, especially through that win streak at home. But unfortunately now on IR. And I mean, we could get into a whole Colton Dodd debate. And you know the Oilers are so greasy, they employ these disgusting humans and then they purposely injure Calgary's best player. But, you know, we can leave that for another day, I suppose. So Cooley has obviously, again, just had a ridiculously good season, both top 20 in the league in save percentage and goals against average, which, you know, on a team like the Flames, who wasn't expected to be all that good and wasn't great until Cooley started playing, is pretty dang good. A lot of, you know, green stats there. There's some yellows in there, but that's just because he hasn't played as much as some of the other people. That's mostly what those are. But we do have some obviously confirmed news. So what we do know is that it is a lower body injury, of course, that happened against Edmonton when Colton Dodd crashed the crease. First of two times he did it. He was removed after the first period and there's no confirmed return date. So obviously going on IR, that means it's going to be a while, but there's no confirmed return date. And there's not even a tentative return date, I guess, is a better way to kind of see that. Which does mean... Who's the person we need? Who's the person we're going to lean on now? It is, of course, Dustin Wolf. When we get into his stats, it's, yeah, not looking too pretty. Some red ones in there. You look at the save percentage and goals against average. It's really bad, especially the goals against average. It has not been a great season for him so far. Yeah, he didn't look great against the Oilers, but it's always tough for someone to go in mid-game and try and rally. We have seen that be successful, but obviously haven't as well. And Wolf has been, you know, You know, not good this year. It used to be that. He would do everything he could and the Flames would almost win and you couldn't fault Wolf. This year, I mean, yeah, you can't fault him for all the goals he's given up, but he's not even making the saves that he needs to be making as well. So if you go start by start this year, he's only had five starts and only one of them was technically a quality start, as you can see from the graphic here. He had a 920 save percentage, his only game above 900, which is a little bit startling in the only game with a saved A positive save versus expected, which is good. And even then, it was only plus 0.4, but it was still in a good win against Anaheim, of course. That kind of sparked the exciting, you know, Flames hockey that we saw in the latter half of this month. Huska, you know, he kind of backs his guy here. He backs Dustin Wolf. He just says he just needs to play, which is funny because whose decision has it been to not been playing him this whole time? It was obviously Huska, but he says he just needs to play. And Wolf, again, he kind of needs to step it up in certain areas. The low danger shots are the ones he has been saving, which you would hope is the case, but even those medium danger ones, he only has a .783 save percentage, which isn't great. And then obviously the high danger, It's quite below as well. But it just, you know, a lot of people say all you need to do is just shoot high on Wolf. And I've always tried to be a guy who has backed Wolf like crazy throughout his career so far. But this season it has not been going well at all. And it kind of seems like, you know, players are figuring him out by just shooting high. At this point in this year so far, it's kind of just been shoot from anywhere. And again, he's been hung out to dry a few times. But there have been other ones where you're thinking, come on, Wolf. You could have maybe saved that one. So this was his own mindset, you know. Around this season, and I believe this was said after the game against Edmonton, he said, you can't create an excuse around it. That's part of a much bigger quote, obviously, but you can't create an excuse around how he's played so far this year. He knows, I mean, I'm sure he's the one beating himself up the most, or at least the person who's most upset at him that that's how his season has gone is himself. So he knows no excuses has to be better, and he needs to become the guy that we kind of need to rely on. Without Cooley, that does mean we, of course, do have a new backup to bring in. As the Flames announced that they have made a couple recalls today. So the Flames have recalled forward William Strongren, which is great in relation to the Hoffman injury. And goaltender Arseny Sergeyev from the Wranglers. Both guys having pretty solid seasons so far with the Wranglers, which is great. Especially Stromgren, which has been awesome. And even just in the most recent game, which happened just yesterday. So Stromgren scored on the power play. It was his third AHL goal. AHL goal and a 4-2 win over Laval, which was great to see. I believe he's actually at 11 points on the season. And then Sergeyev stopped 36 of 38 in the win, literally the day before getting recalled. So no shocks that either of these guys were the guys to come up, but very happy to note that they were. And as Ryan Pike points out here, the way Stromgren's been doing it is William Stromgren hasn't been flashy for the Wranglers this year, but he's just been good. Like consistently good, which is not a bad way to be at all. He's up to 11 points. There it is. He's up to 11 points in 11 games with the Wranglers. Second goal Thursday night, as we just saw there. So great that he has gotten a call up. He's a guy who's always, you know, one of those fringe NHLers. Could he come up? Could he not? We have seen him come up in the past and Huska has not utilized him one bit. So it'll be very interesting to note if he does get utilized. Heading into this stretch here, because we don't really know what the lineup's fully going to look like for the next couple of weeks here with all of these injuries. But we'll see if Stromgren gets in. And that, of course, does start with tonight's game. Get into that one. The Flames are back home here tonight at the Dome as Calgary seeks, you know, a bit of a response after that very horrible showing against Edmonton in the Battle of Alberta. So game day here. The game goes at 6 p.m. at the Dome against Seattle. And Seattle is the team that has had our numbers so far this year. Two 6-1 losses to the Kraken so far this year, which is, yeah, not impressive at all. And it looks like, in terms of lineup notes, Max Siplykov, so the Flames' best player, will be back in the lineup tonight against Seattle. He's sat out the last five games. I mean, we had four wins in those five games. Kind of shocking when, again, Siplykov's your best player. Stromgren and Hanley, everyone, I hope you've seen that viral video of Hanley and his son pulling him as a hockey card. But they were on the ice late after an optimal, which I think was supposed to say optional, morning skate. They'll be healthy scratches tonight. So no Stromgren tonight, which I guess isn't a huge surprise with Siplykov back in. And then Hanley has just been the healthy scratch pretty much all year. And then Dustin Wolfe, of course, does start in net for the 6 p.m. puck drop. So Wolfe's first start in quite a while, a few weeks it feels like. But yeah, hopefully he can bounce back because he was the goalie in both of those earlier Seattle games, I believe, as well. So they kind of have his number and he needs to make a statement here. If we get into the history against the Kraken, I know it kind of looks different every time. And there are some recent results like the 6-1 loss. Back on October 1st, but we actually have a great record against Seattle all time. 11-6-3 since the Kraken became a team, but in the last 10 were 3-5-2, which means, I believe, if I can do math correctly, at one point we were 8-1-1 against the Kraken all time, and that has slipped quite a bit. 3-5-2 with those, again, two horrible losses to start this season. If we get into the standings now, Seattle, obviously off to a pretty good start here. Hide myself so that we can see the full thing. They're currently in a playoff spot, top three in the Pacific Division, whereas the Flames were 5-7 now, sitting at 10 points, with LA, Chicago, and Vancouver all below us. Vancouver just looks so, so horrible. In terms of the entire league as well, Philadelphia is below us as well. They also look horrible. So, interesting to note. I believe LA won last night. They almost tried to choke. I think they were up 5-1, and then they ended up winning 6-5 in overtime, I think. But that's kind of what's going on with the standings there, of course. And again, for me, the key to this game is the special teams. Now, the power play and penalty kill both took a little dip against Edmonton the other night. I mean, your penalty kill is always going to against the... Power play merchants, the Oilers, but still, you know, top 10 for both and the power play hopefully can get it going as they weren't able to do much in our most recent game, but hopefully they can absolutely get that going and make it a lot more of an exciting game than the one we watched a couple nights ago. Now let's get into the comment of the day to wrap up this video as we'd love to do here on the channel comes from the most recent video, of course, and this is a great one here from Robert saying keep frost. Five years, six mil a year, and then have a line of Ferriby, Frost, and Coronado, which is really interesting. A lot of people would like to keep Frost. A lot of people wouldn't like to keep Frost. And, you know, maybe around that, that isn't too bad if that's kind of like our third line for the future, because you've got to think of the youngsters coming in to be on those top couple lines. And, you know, would you want Coronado to be with those guys? It is. You know, all of it's hypothetical, but the Frost debate is truly becoming the most mainstream thing on Flame's social media right now. So I thought that was an interesting one to throw in there for you guys. Thank you so much for watching this video. Please subscribe to Like What You Saw here today and have a wonderful rest of your day.