Have the Flames finally found a third line?

It’s no accident that Sam Bennett has been an on-going concern in articles about the Calgary Flames this year. The club was desperate for the 21-year-old forward to take a step forward in his third full season in order to solidify their notoriously weak forward depth.

Last year, Calgary’s bottom-six rotation was poor, both relative to the top-six and the rest of the league. The ill-conceived Troy Brouwer contract caused the team to experiment with him in various circumstances, primarily as a winger for Bennett with Kris Versteeg on the other flank. The trio sank, getting routinely outshot and out-chanced despite fairly rosy circumstances.

Glen Gulutzan learned his lesson by the end of 2016-17 and bumped Brouwer down the rotation permanently to start this season. It didn’t help — at least not immediately. Bennett began the year with a terrible dry spell and was still getting run over in terms of shot and chance share. Not only did it look like the Flames would be terribly top heavy again, it seemed like Bennett’s future with the organization was in jeopardy. As Tyler Dellow recently pointed out, the bottom rotation has been so poor in aggregate, it almost makes sense to break up the 3M line to try to spread the wealth.

That said, the club has been getting much better results from the current third line featuring Bennett on left wing, Mark Jankowski in the middle, and Garnet Hathaway on the right. Has Calgary finally found a depth combination that works?

Let’s get the obvious caveat out of the way here: the trio has only spent seven games together, a grand total of 45:52 at even strength. That’s a pretty small sample of data. Nevertheless, their results are compelling enough to warrant a look.

Via Natural Stat Trick’s line tool, we can see that the newly formed kid unit has put together a 58.51 CF% over their seven games together (or +2.70 CF% relative). This combination has also managed to out-chance the bad guys, with a scoring chance ratio of 57.5 percent and a high danger Corsi ratio (shot attempts from scoring areas) of 76.5 percent. The last time a Flames third line put up a stretch of possession dominance like that, Mikael Backlund was the center.

Those are some glittering results. We can break them down a bit to add further context. In terms of shot generation, the threesome is humming along at 71.95 CF/60 (about 72 shot attempts per hour of ice time) and just 51.02 CA/60 (51 shot attempts against per 60). Anyone who has been following along with the Seven Game Segments will know that the latter number is the big concern for Calgary this year — the team has averaged about 57 CA/60 so far, the same rate as the poor Bob Hartley Flames in his last season in Calgary, and about five shots worse than last year. Having the kid line come in well under that number is encouraging, given how pretty much every other third line combination has failed miserably at containing the opposition.

The positive shift is most obvious in Bennett, who has scored eight points in his last eight games. He has also seen his previously poor possession numbers slowly climbing upwards since he was shifted to the wing:

To some degree, the spike in points is regression to the mean — the player was suffering through dreadful percentages to start the season, so the pucks were bound to start going in at some point. That said, there’s no doubt his line is spending more time and getting better chances in the offensive zone since Jankowski arrived. With Jaromir Jagr on the right side, Janko and Bennett managed a CF% of 50.5 in 105 minutes. Much less compelling, but still better than other incarnations of the Flames third line. This comparison is noteworthy because both the Hathaway and Jagr versions of the lines seem to be facing the same quality of competition and the same ratio of zone starts.

For whatever reason, though, the kids have taken off with Hathaway on the starboard side. Previously a replacement level crash and banger, Hathaway has been something of a revelation this season. Before being recalled, the 26-year-old winger had put up 11 goals and 19 points in 18 games for the Stockton Heat in the AHL. So far in the NHL, Hathaway has four points in eight games and a 55 percent CF%. By eye, Hathaway seems far more focused on being an effective 200-foot player this year than simply hitting everything that moves. It’s the sort of transformation most fringe players have to make in order to stick in the league long-term (Micheal Ferland has similarly transformed his game over the years).

So what’s going on here? To some degree, it’s difficult to unpack just seven games of work spanning a mere 45 minutes of ice time. First and foremost, it’s clear that Jankowski is not only an NHL centre but better down the middle than Bennett, who could never seem to balance his defensive and offensive game as a pivot. Janko is still living in a hotel room in downtown Calgary. It’s safe to say he should find somewhere more permanent at this point.

The team’s challenge is determining if Hathaway is indeed the causative factor in the kid line’s current success. If so, it has ramifications down the line-up once Jagr returns from injury. Gulutzan will have to figure out what to do with the Hall of Famer and the organization will have to send someone else down to the farm in order to keep Hathaway up (probably frequent scratch Freddie Hamilton).

With Jagr on the shelf, for now, the team can continue to run the kids together and see if they can maintain a decently high-performance level. I suspect they won’t continue to outplay the bad guys to quite the same degree forever, but anything above the mediocre results the team was getting from Bennett at al. previously is cause to keep them together indefinitely. A solid third line not only diversifies the Flames attack but makes them far more likely to join the ranks of contenders in the West.

(Top photo credit: Derek Leung/Getty Images)