Three takeaways as Flames stun reigning champion Hurricanes with best effort so far this season

It’s got to be asked: What can a win over the Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes do for the Calgary Flames?

Few people would have predicted a Flames win on Sunday night at the Saddledome. You’d have looked crazy if you’d said pre-game that a team that had won only one of its first seven games was going to beat a powerhouse that was carrying a seven-game winning streak into the matchup.

And then, well … the Flames put in their best performance — by far — of the season and secured a 3-2 win.

Forget the standings for a second. What can that do for a team’s confidence? What can it mean for their belief in the process? 

“We need good things to happen because they’re putting in a lot of good work in different areas,” said Flames head coach Ryan Huska. “Tonight, it was nice to see them get rewarded against the team that is the standard right now.”

It took every single player on the ice to get the Flames over the line against the Hurricanes. Devin Cooley was simply outstanding, stopping 34-of-36 shots and keeping them in the game early whenever the champions turned up the volume. 

Their young guns stepped up in a major way, with Matvei Gridin notching his first goal of the season with a rocket into the top corner, Zayne Parekh picking up a stunning assist on Morgan Frost’s go-ahead marker just over a minute later and Jonathan Castagna solidifying his place in the lineup with outstanding work in the faceoff circle and important ice time in the game’s final minutes.

Frost was excellent, too, scoring on the power-play and assisting on Yegor Sharangovich’s game-winner.

There were a lot of other names that merit mention, too. It took a full team effort to secure the two points.

“We just know how we’ve got to play,” Gridin said. “Just got to keep doing that. If we (beat) the Stanley Cup champions, we can beat every team.”

Here are three takeaways from Sunday’s big win:

We’ve already mentioned Cooley, but the simple fact is that he needed to be great for the Flames to have any chance here.

And through seven previous games, there hadn’t really been a single one where you could confidently say the Flames got truly outstanding work from whoever they had between the pipes, whether that was Cooley or Dustin Wolf.

They finally got that on Sunday.

“For the team, it’s excellent. We have the ability to play great every night. It’s just a matter of time,” Cooley said. “The goalies, too, everyone’s panicking about the goalies, everyone just chill out. We’re going to be fine. Dustin’s going to be fine, I’m going to be fine. 

“Sometimes you just have a bad start and things aren’t going your way, but I have so much faith in our goalie department, in (Flames goaltending coach Jason LaBarbera), in our work ethic, in our process, in our talent level. I just have so much faith.”

The Flames need performances like the one Cooley gave them on Sunday if they’re going to turn their season around. He didn’t just make a lot of saves, he made big ones in big moments, too.

And it was the biggest difference against the Canes.

“He was awesome,” Huska said. “We need a goaltender to do that, you don’t want to have them make saves like that every night but you need them to be your best players, especially when you’re in a stretch like we’ve been in over the last little while. I thought he was excellent tonight.”

The biggest moment in Sunday’s game came midway through the second period.

The Hurricanes seemed to put their foot on the gas. They got the puck in deep and relentlessly circled the puck.

For the better part of three minutes, the Flames couldn’t get the puck back, they couldn’t clear it, they couldn’t do much of anything. A couple of their players were trapped on the ice for nearly three minutes.

Then, it was over. They took possession, skated down the ice, put the puck on Gridin’s stick and suddenly the game was tied.

“I think that was the turning point. It was (defencemen Zach) Whitecloud and (Yan) Kuznetsov who were out there three minutes,” Huska said. “We gave up some zone time, we gave up some chances, but we held the fort and they found a way. To me, that shifted the momentum in our favour a little bit  where we got the quick goal after we got the puck out of the zone and then a power-play goal after that.”

Parekh’s pass on Frost’s goal in the second period was a thing of beauty and absolutely worth seeking out for anyone who hasn’t seen the highlight. 

It was also the latest sign that the Flames’ power-play is rounding into form.

They’ve now converted on 4-of-19 opportunities this season, good for the 12th-best mark in the NHL.

Parekh, in particular, looked lively whenever the Flames were playing five-on-four, and had arguably his best game of the season on Sunday.

“I think we were just happy to score a power-play goal,” Parekh said. “I think last year, I don’t know what we ran at but it wasn’t great. We came in this year with the mindset that we wanted to be better on the power-play.”