"Are you the team last year that had 94 points, whose speciality teams were in the top-10 and everything seemed to go well, or are you the team this year?

"You gotta ask yourself: What team are you?'' reasoned the Flames coach.

Reflection is something Glen Gulutzan has much too much time for right at the moment.

"I thought a year ago we probably exceeded some expectations. I thought this year we were under expectations, for sure.

"But you do have to ask yourself: Which team are you?"

After returning from Saskatoon, where he'd visited survivors and family of the tragic bus crash of the junior Humboldt Broncos, Gulutzan was back at the Scotiabank Saddledome Monday for exit meetings with his players.

The sting of missing the post-season will linger for some time.

"This,'' he reasoned, "is a business where the margins are small. You lose a goaltender. You lose a top scorer. You see any team go through it, pick a year, and those margins can be tighter.

"I don't really believe there's a complete turning point in our season. You can try to find one and it's easier post-mortem, right? You can dissect. It's harder when you're going through it. It's like being a doctor and trying to find out what the illness is. You've got to go through a bunch of things.

"All I do know is that we were sitting in a playoff spot at the trade deadline, in Dallas. From there I think were 4-14-1 or 5-13-1. You have to ask yourself what happened there. From that point on to the Anaheim game we lost at home there was a 13-game stretch, our most important 13, with our own destiny in our hands, and why we didn't produce in that stretch.

"I don't know if there's any tipping or turning point, but certainly the 13 most crucial games in my mind are from Dallas to after the Anaheim game and what happened in that juncture."

As much as the goal-scoring drought in the closing stages, with Sean Monahan playing hurt, Matthew Tkachuk out injured and Johnny Gaudreau off tending to personal matters, hurt his team, they simply didn't put the puck in the net when they had the chances.

"We got into a bit of a dry spell at the wrong time. It didn't become a struggle to get shots and chances but it became a struggle to score. But at the end of the day when you go through that, you have to defend better.

"What we didn't do well enough during that stretch is defend."

Another area that let the side down, in Gulutzan's mind, was cohesiveness.

"Everyone's going to dissect what they want to dissect but if I look at the two years I've been here, with last year's team we did a good job of putting a team together," he said.

"This year I thought we had better players. We just never had as consistent a team effort, as consistent a lineup, we as coaches didn't bring these guys together as we could've.

"It's not always the team with the best players that wins. It's the best team. We all know that. I look back at that and think what more we could've done to build a tighter bond with the group to withstand the times when it got tough.

"Because when it got tough we weren't there, for those 13 games I'm talking about."