Pulled midway through the game after surrendering four goals, David Rittich paused as he walked towards the dressing room to headbutt a door.
Rather forcefully.
It’s the kind of move the organization has mimicked of late, self-inflicting all sorts of pain to reach new lows Thursday.
A 6-1 loss to the last-placed Ottawa Senators wiped out any good feelings the Flames may have generated in Toronto the previous two outings, leaving the Flames with just one regulation win in their last eight games.
It marked the third time in six games the team’s starter was pulled from the game.
In that span, the Flames have scored just eight goals, finishing with only one goal in five of the six.
So much for the players’ belief that the team’s identity revolves around being a hard-checking team that can score.
Only seven teams in the league have scored fewer goals per game, which coach Geoff Ward and several players believe has plenty to do with the high rate of neutral zone turnovers costing them zone entries.
“The last little bit we’ve been having trouble getting into the offensive zone – that’s certainly going to be a factor,” said Ward, adding his team isn’t getting to the inside once in the zone.
“We missed the net an awful lot. That’s not the only night that has happened.”
This cub seems to be running out of answers these days.
And time.
Playing the second half of a back-to-back following their loss in Toronto Wednesday, the Flames trailed 2-0 after the first period before a Milan Lucic goal breathed life into the visitors two minutes into the second.
Five minutes later the Senators had scored two more, including an Erik Brannstrom slapper from outside the blueline that eluded Rittich and ultimately ended his otherwise impressive return to form of late.
It was a tough pill for Rittich to swallow after stopping 70 shots in a row against the Leafs before losing the game in overtime.
“After the fourth one it’s tough,” said Andersson, whose club showed very little pushback after that. “We played in their zone quite a bit and got some shots through and it just felt like every time we had a turnover or odd-man [rush] against they capitalized. We’ve got to stick together and believe in each other still and try to create more energy.”
And try not to make it so obvious that, after an admittedly bad goal, they don’t give up.
“Feels like it was deflating after the third goal, and especially the fourth goal [but] we can’t let a goal suck the life out of us the way it has recently,” said Lucic, whose club gave up two more in the third with Flames fourth-stringer Artyom Zagidulin making his NHL debut.
“We’ve got to be better. This one definitely is not a good feeling right now.”
Playing their fifth game in seven nights, the Flames were indeed showing it, admittedly not at their best following an emotional ending in Toronto less than 24 hours earlier.
Nonetheless, you can bet the noise calling for the coach to be fired, trades to be made and hell to pay will reach a feverish pitch Friday.
Well aware of that, Lucic wanted his thoughts known on where the blame should lie.
“This one is on us, it’s on the players,” said Lucic, a longtime supporter of Ward, with whom he won a Stanley Cup in Boston.
“The coaching staff hasn’t changed from last year and that was one of our strong points and when we started to move in the right direction, playing as a five man unit and for each other and sacrificing for each other. We need to find that again. That’s up to the players and no one else.”
Those who tuned in to see how the Tkachuk brothers would fare against one another left disappointed, as neither found the scoresheet despite generating ten shots and ten hits between them. Big Brady had nine of those hits.
“Anybody that thinks we’re going to fight is an idiot,” declared Matthew before the game, potentially costing the broadcast some viewers.
“I don’t know why people keep saying that each and every year. They obviously haven’t played against their brother in a sport ever.”
If you’re a Flames fan the most entertaining moment of the night was when the button on analyst Kelly Hrudey’s jacket was shown popping off to start the third period, causing the veteran broadcaster to laugh hysterically.
Flames fans will have to smile through the pain until Saturday when game two of this four-game series starts at 11 a.m. MT.
PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
