Taken on its face, the high end of the Calgary Flames roster is probably among the best in the Western Conference.

You have Johnny Gaudreau, Mark Giordano, Dougie Hamilton, TJ Brodie, the entire 3M line, Sean Monahan. The good news is that basically all those guys, with the exception of Giordano (very old) and Matthew Tkachuk (very young), are in their mid- to late-20s.

This is what you’d call a team’s “window to win” — the point at which most of a team’s big-ticket players are around the primes of their careers — but the Flames have a very serious problem. You can have a good group at the top of your lineup, but if you don’t support them at the lower end, your ability to actually win while your window is open is limited.

Over the past few years, the Flames have done little to support that core group, making bad bets on outside or simply having good bets not pay off, not really developing prospects at any kind of reasonable rate, not spending to the ceiling, and (perhaps most importantly) getting it very, very wrong in net.

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We’re now past the point where this could be called a rebuilding team. You’re no longer rebuilding when you fire the old coach, trade picks away for more immediate help, make the playoffs, and so on.

Last year the Flames should have gotten good goaltending. Brian Elliott and Chad Johnson are two guys with very solid track records. They combined to go .910 over the course of the season, in a league in which the average netminder stopped shots at .915. They made the playoffs anyway, though just barely, and got swept out of the first round.

So the team recognized goaltending as a major flaw; it probably cost them 10 or 11 goals over the course of the season, which is the equivalent of about three points in the standings. They gain three points and maybe they avoid the Ducks in the first round, depending upon where they lost them and so on. So in response to this major flaw, their big offseason plan was to go out and get… Mike Smith and Eddie Lack?

Smith has been roughly league-average the past two seasons, but the one before that he was horrific (.904). He also didn’t carry a particularly heavy workload over that time, averaging fewer than 50 appearances per season. Moreover, he’s 35. So the Flames are gambling that a 35-year-old goalie whose career numbers are hardly inspiring will do better than Elliott, which doesn’t seem likely based on the track records of the two goalies in question.

In addition, backup Eddie Lack has a whopping .902 save percentage over the past two seasons, so the idea that he will somehow return to the .917 he posted as a “1b” goalie over two seasons in Vancouver is likewise farfetched.

Lack’s on a one-year deal. Calgary has some interesting goaltending prospects it could turn to after that — most likely Jon Gillies, though he wasn’t great in the AHL last season (.910). But Smith is signed for each of the next two seasons, at which point that makes three of the prime years for the Flames core — or the waning days of Giordano’s usefulness — potentially wasted on subaverage goaltending.

The likelihood that a Smith-led platoon of any kind over the next 164 regular-season games continues to not-deliver seems fairly high, but again, he and whatever backups they use don’t have to be all that good to match what Calgary’s guys managed to not-deliver last year.

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