You take what you can get on this day, the most depressing day of any season no matter how it ended.
You’ve got Matt Keith’s dog, Riley, coming in to say hello during my Jack Capuano interview. You’ve got Riley seeing Kip Brennan walking in the room… and taking off, running, to Brennan. Then you’ve got Kip wearing a wig that had him looking like a refugee from a hair-metal band… and threatening to wear it in to his exit interview. Then you’ve got Fata putting it on later and threatening to come back in the fall with his own hair like that. (“That’s presumptuous,” someone said.) You’ve got Steve Regier talking about taking a summer job laying down asphalt. He wanted to go outside, where a crew has been tearing up the back parking lot for a few weeks, to get job advice. You’ve got a diagram on the whiteboard of next year’s power-play breakout; “44” was the player listed in four of the five spots. You’ve got one player packing up a hardcore (Kalamazoo) K-Wings bag. (Apparently his own bag got taken accidentally by someone else.) You’ve got two people saying goodbye to MacArthur, then looking at each other. “What’s his first name?”
You’ve got Jeremy Colliton, fully confident in the Flames even after they fell behind 3-0 Sunday night. (If I’d pounded a different angle for the wrap, I had examples galore: the Sharks’ blown 3-0 lead in the last NHL game Sunday, and the Rampage’s blown 3-2, third-period lead to another group of Flames in the last AHL game Sunday.) It was funny, too; he talked about feeling a lot better in the second half, and that clicked with something in my mind. Did you, I asked him, kind of underestimate how much the shoulder was bothering you early on? Yeah, he said, he had: He’d think that he had turned the corner, that he’d gotten better, and then he’d get a little better than that, and say, yeah, turned the corner… Sounded familiar.
Theme of the day was development, how the team kept feeding players to the NHL while somehow keeping itself afloat to the wire. The cost of that development, sometimes, is wins; playing the kids sometimes meant giving up a few leads. Capuano was proud of his staff’s devotion to practices, pointing to Tim Jackman as an example of a guy who worked hard in practice and got results on the ice.
A bunch of people left at once earlier than I’d expected while I was talking to someone else, so a couple of things I’d wanted to ask will have to wait. We’ll see what we can get ASAP. The official word is that a lot of decisions aren’t yet made. There’s always turnover, and we expect nothing less. Some decisions will depend on higher-up decisions. No one exactly walked out saying he was gone forever.
Kiddie camp is a little later than usual, so July 1 is probably the next official Key Date. Good gravy, that’s a long way away.
On the other hand, this season went fast. Don’t know if I’m getting old, or what.