Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

The Calgary Flames are, improbably enough, sitting in an extremely good position: eight points from their first five games, no regulation losses, and playing a genuinely entertaining and exciting brand of hockey.

Anyone who has watched the team in the last three years knows that any of those three occurrences happening at any given time was a rarity, and certainly given that they sold anyone who was especially good or at least still had trade value last spring, this is an extremely surprising turn of events. The reason for it, of course, is luck. The Flames have failed to lose their first five games in regulation despite having both Joey MacDonald and Kari Ramo posting .897 save percentages, the skaters posting a corsi-for percentage of just 46.7, and their PDO through those five was 108.6, second in the league behind only San Jose.

Nonetheless, the underlying numbers have done nothing to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for the Flames in Calgary, where no team has ever started a season like this. A big part of the reason that's the case is the fact that Sean Monahan, the sixth overall pick in this summer's draft and the center upon whom Jay Feaster is essentially staking his reputation, has been positively electrifying.

Calgary has played five games, and he has points in all of them. His four goals are double what the next-closest players on the team have. His most recent tally was a late and very nice game-winner. He has been in every way a revelation for coach Bob Hartley and his time on ice has gone up steadily as a result, from 11:40 in his first game to 16:31 in his fifth, in a trend that only seems likely to continue, though as you might imagine exactly zero seconds of that has been played on the penalty kill.

As a junior-eligible rookie — he just turned 19 on Saturday — has four games left in his tryout period with the Flames, at which point the team will have to make a decision about whether to keep him up with the big club or send him back to Ottawa of the OHL for another year. Given that he's point-a-game and the rumblings that he's "making it hard" for the Flames to stash him away for another year for a good week at this point, it looks for all the world as though the Flames are going to keep him.

And they absolutely shouldn't.

From a production standpoint it is obviously becoming an increasingly impossible proposition to have the kid bus it around Ontario for another year. However, and not to get too much into a conspiracy theory, but the Flames seem to be working very, very hard to make the case for keeping him up.

His personal underlying numbers (relative corsi of 9.0, fourth on the team) only seem to get better as he's sheltered from tough competition — he's facing the weakest opponents of anyone on the Flames, as you might expect — and beginning just 25 percent of his shifts in the defensive zone, and yet 48.5 percent end there. His shooting percentage is at 30.8, which almost couldn't be more unsustainable.

All those points, all those timely goals, making it pretty easy to ignore all the times he's getting hemmed into his own zone and watching as other teams score around him; not to put too much stock into plus-minus, but of the 16 goals the Flames allowed through five games (which, hoo boy that's a lot), Monahan has been on the ice for six.

But even beyond the hockey-related arguments, there's the business side of things to consider as well. Monahan could score a point a game all season long (he won't) and the team would still finish well out of the playoffs; again, the stats for the whole team are horrifyingly bad and frankly counterproductive to the tanking they're meant to be doing. This is a squad that's going to hit a wall, probably soon, and the result is going to be ugly.

So what, then, is the point of having Monahan around, and burning a year of his entry-level contract, on a team that is going to finish very far out of the playoff picture?

He doesn't make the team better, or at least not better-enough, to justify it. The Flames are, realistically, a good three and maybe even four or five years away from being any good at all, and based on this start might even have a little bit farther too fall before they bottom out entirely. Keeping him just serves to make Monahan more expensive sooner, and there's no reason for it at all.