The Calgary Flames insist that rumours of a lockerroom mutiny may have been greatly exaggerated.
There were whispers over the final couple weeks of the Calgary Flames season about a blow-up between head coach Darryl Sutter and last year’s prized free-agent signing, centre Nazem Kadri.
With the Flames missing the playoffs, everything was under the microscope.
And the supposed discord between star player and head coach was the source a tonne of speculation, especially after Sportsnet insider Elliotte Friedman suggested that frustration had “boiled over” on a mid-March episode of his 32 Thoughts podcast.
Speaking with the media on lockerroom clean-out day, though, Kadri did his best to downplay any tension.
“There obviously is a lot of speculation with that stuff,” Kadri told reporters on Friday. “Sometimes, even with your teammates, you might butt heads a little bit. At the end of the day, you understand you’re a team and you play for each other and you stand up for each other. That’s kind of what we improved on throughout the rest of the season.
“To think everything throughout the course of the season is going to be rainbows and butterflies is just unrealistic. It’s not always going to be easy and there was a lot of adversity we had to face this year.”
Because of the rumoured blow-up between Kadri and Sutter, his answers to questions about his head coach were among the most anticipated of Friday’s end-of-season media availabilities.
For anyone hoping for drama, though, his answers were pretty disappointing. Maybe that’s unsurprising, when you consider that Kadri and Sutter are both under contract for next season.
But from Kadri’s perspective, sure, there are things a player is going to disagree with their coach about during a season, but that’s to be expected. It’s a long season, after all.
“I’ve had a long history of coaches with similar styles and, you know, kinda that hard exterior and they try to get the best out of you,” Kadri said. “For me, I don’t think it was that much of an adjustment. Obviously, through the course of the season you try to do the best you can to adjust not only to the coach but teammates, new players.”
While Kadri downplayed any animosity or tension between himself and Sutter, other players offered positively glowing reviews of their head coach.
Tyler Toffoli, in his second stint under Sutter’s tutelage, had high praise.
“I mean, my relationship with Darryl is for sure unique in regards to I’ve known him my whole career. I love him as a coach, I think he’s the best coach I’ve ever had, personally,” Toffoli said. “He holds everyone accountable and he makes you work. At the end of the day, he’s our boss and he makes the decisions for when we’re playing and everything, so that’s how I view it and I like him as my coach.”
Even Jonathan Huberdeau, who struggled in his first year under Sutter and with the Flames, came out and said that his relationship with his head coach was good.
In fact, there wasn’t a single guy who spoke with the media who had anything negative to say about the relationship between the players and their coach.
That’s smart, obviously, given that Sutter is contracted to continue coaching the Flames for the next two seasons, but it certainly poured cold water on the rumours of lockerroom strife.
This was a hard, frustrating season for the Flames. All those one-goal losses take their toll on players, mentally, and there were absolutely days where it wasn’t necessarily the happiest group in the NHL.
But as the players explained, that was a simple by-product of losing. It’s not that much fun, and is no reflection on a rift between Sutter and themselves.
“I think it was fine,” said Flames forward Trevor Lewis, who previously played under Sutter with the Los Angeles Kings. “Darryl will push you hard and guys respond to it different ways but I think the relationship between him and us was good.”
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