Mysterious ‘circumstances’ cause strange split as Flames open training camp

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The coach didn’t split the Calgary Flames’ top line.

“Circumstances” did.

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Mysterious ‘circumstances’ cause strange split as Flames open training camp Back to video

The Flames opened Training Camp 2.0 on Monday at the Saddledome, and eyebrows were raised when superstar Johnny Gaudreau wasn’t grouped with his usual first-line sidekicks — centre Sean Monahan and right-winger Elias Lindholm — during the morning session.

Twenty-one gents, plus a hat-trick of goalies, laced ’em up for that 10 a.m. spin. Gaudreau wasn’t among them.

Instead, he was one of eight skaters to hit the ice just past noon. There was only one puck-stopper with that pack.

A pair of players — forwards Dillon Dube and Buddy Robinson — weren’t spotted at all.

And then this …

“Circumstances that became apparent last week to us made it so that we had to split the groups the way you saw them today,” replied Flames interim head coach Geoff Ward when asked about the head-scratching roster breakdown. (This guy is a former teacher, so it’s not like he can’t divide 35 into two similar-sized squads. It would be a no-brainer, for starters, to have two netminders in each session.)

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“I can’t elaborate any more than that — just the circumstances we’re aware of forced us to. We had two groups originally, and we had to move some bodies around and the teams ended up as they were today.

“They may change on an ongoing basis, daily, from here. We’ll see. But I can’t elaborate any more than that right now.”

Hmmmm …

While Ward didn’t say much about the groupings, he couldn’t say anything about why Dube and Robinson didn’t hit the ice on the opening day of training camp.

That’s a league-wide mandate.

As part of the NHL’s restart during the pandemic, there will no specifics on the health of an absent player. They will be, simply, “unfit to play” or, as the Flames termed it with Dube and Robinson, “unable to participate.”

That’s all the explanation we’ll get. The league maintains it’s a matter of personal privacy.

The unfit-to-play-ers could have been injured during small-group skates or off-ice training.

They could be tending to a personal matter.

Or they could have been showing symptoms of COVID-19 or been among the 43 NHLers to test positive either inside or outside of Phase 2. (Those stats were shared Monday, based on thousands and thousands of tests so far.)

“Yeah, I have a feeling that’s probably going to come up now with everything,” said Flames alternate captain Matthew Tkachuk, asked if it’s fair that media and fans will automatically wonder if any missing man has contracted the virus. “But I think once games and practices start happening, I mean, guys block shots and miss a week with a foot injury.

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“I know it’s probably human nature that people are going to start speculating that. But I’m going to advise people, don’t over-speculate or don’t do it for a good tweet or don’t do any of that stuff. Because there is plenty of stuff that happens in a hockey game.”

Before we get to the games again, two-dozen NHL teams need to get to a pair of hub cities with healthy rosters.

The Flames will hold nearly two weeks of training camp in Calgary and then move into their bubble hotel in Edmonton. They’ll open their best-of-five play-in series against the Winnipeg Jets on Aug. 1.

Certainly, they’ll want Gaudreau to get some reps with the first line and top power-play unit before then.

They’ll presumably want to reunite Andrew Mangiapane, who was also lumped in Monday’s late group, with Mikael Backlund and Tkachuk. That was, after all, their most productive trio leading into the pandemic pause.

The smaller afternoon crew featured several other regulars — netminder Cam Talbot, the could-be second defence pairing of Rasmus Andersson and Noah Hanifin and forwards Sam Bennett, Mark Jankowski, Milan Lucic and Zac Rinaldo.

Those guys had to be healthy to even get into the rink, so what circumstances forced them to be separated from the rest of their pals? Why the two hours of social-media speculation about why Johnny Hockey wasn’t working alongside his usual BFFs?

Typically, Day 1 training-camp combos wouldn’t be big news. But the Flames are preparing for a playoff push, and Monahan and Lindholm were taking line rushes with … Alan Quine? He spent most of the season in the minors.

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“Well, you always have two groups in camp,” said Flames captain Mark Giordano, speaking a couple hours before his boss revealed that his original plan had to be torn up because of those mysterious circumstances. “But you know what? At this point, we’re just listening to what the trainers, what the medical staff, what everyone is saying and what our coaches are telling us to do.

“And it’s not going to be something unique to us. I think every team is going to have certain situations where guys are split. Whichever group you’re in, you have to come, get your work in, get focused and I think we’ll be fine. By the end of camp, we’ll be ready to go.”

Indeed, similar stories are being written elsewhere.

In Vancouver, old pal Micheal Ferland was “unfit to play” Monday.

Ditto for defenceman Caleb Jones in Edmonton and goalie Corey Crawford in Chicago.

The New York Islanders had five absences, all described exactly how the NHL is insisting. The Pittsburgh Penguins announced they were “voluntarily sidelining” nine of their campers due to potential secondary exposure.

This is the NHL’s new normal, or at least the for-now-normal.

“At some point, we will have the group together, as we move towards the bubble, and we look forward to that,” Ward said after Monday’s work at the Saddledome. “But right now, as we move through the first stages of training camp, this is going to be something that we will have to deal with on a daily basis.

“So tomorrow, we’ll see what that brings. And we may move different people around at different times, as circumstances dictate.”

wgilbertson@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/WesGilbertson