Alberta's Rat Control Zone Remains Undefeated on Opening Night

Saddledome — Seattle beat the Flames 6-1 on Thursday night in the first game of the Saddledome’s last season, and Brennan Othmann did not dress for it.

The Kraken scored three times in the first period. Jordan Eberle’s power-play goal at 9:10 came six seconds after Matvei Gridin went off for holding, and Vince Dunn made it 2-0 thirty-two seconds later. Frederick Gaudreau scored with half a minute left in the period. Chandler Stephenson and Matty Beniers added two more in the first five minutes of the third. Ryan Strome scored Calgary’s only goal at 16:35 of the third, from Yegor Sharangovich and Connor Zary, and Kaapo Kakko got it back 26 seconds later. Calgary took seven minors and Seattle scored on one of its five power plays. The Kraken outshot the Flames 32-25 and took all three stars. Attendance was 18,494.

The editor of this site went the long way in. The CTrain out of Downtown West-Kerby, about an hour and a half before the scheduled puck drop, was not full.

It let out at Victoria Park/Stampede into a crowd wearing the building’s history on its back, Iginla and Nilsson and Kiprusoff among the name bars crossing the tracks toward the Dome.

The seat was in the press level, section PL5, the nosebleeds, also chosen for the experience, with the editor’s standing order in hand, the drink that used to be called a chocolate malt and is now billed as a Cinnamalt.

The building did its part. The lights went down at seven, string players played to a standing crowd, a four-minute film ran through 43 years of the place, and by the time the farewell crest had been projected across the whole ice surface, with both teams lined up on their blue lines, it was twenty past seven.

The rat

At 2:58 on Monday afternoon, two minutes before the league’s deadline, the Flames published 23 names. The forward listed eleventh, wearing 78, was Brennan Othmann.

He had been under contract for ten days. His entry-level deal ran out on July 1 and he spent the summer as a restricted free agent with no arbitration rights. He signed on September 18, the second day of camp, a one-year, two-way deal at $975,000, the last Flame to sign. Daily Faceoff’s read going in was that barring a strong camp he would most likely go back to the Wranglers, and this was the first season he would have needed to clear waivers to get there.

What followed was the shortest audition on the roster. He played two exhibition games and thirteen minutes and seven seconds of hockey, total, and took thirty-two penalty minutes doing it. The first appearance lasted 53 seconds: an elbow on Seattle’s Ville Ottavainen at 5:05 of the first, a fight with John Hayden, a game misconduct. Four days later in Seattle, Ottavainen came looking for him, and the penalty sheet gave Ottavainen a fighting major, an instigator minor and a game misconduct. Othmann got charging and a ten-minute misconduct. He had already set up two goals by then.

Emerald City Hockey posted the sequence that night with a verdict of its own:

Emerald City Hockey: Don't like this from Ville Ottavainen. He takes a routine hit from Othmann, then pulls him down by the head and feeds him punches while he's defenseless.

He has a word for what he does, and he used it on the club’s own camera the day Calgary cut to 27.

“I’ve always considered myself kind of a rat in a sense, and I feel like that’s pretty rare in today’s hockey.”

He traces it, in the same scrum, to playing lacrosse as a kid, and says it did not come from his father, who he describes as more of a scorer.

The same afternoon Ryan Huska used the same word, speaking to Postmedia’s Daniel Austin.

“The rat side is important. I think that’s something that at times our team misses a little bit. You want someone who is going to drag people into the fight, and I think again, a player like that with the style he’s playing right now creates competition with some other players.”

There is one group in this province that would not approve. Norway rats turned up on a farm near Alsask in the summer of 1950, and Alberta declared them a pest that year under an act that obliged every municipality and every person to destroy them. Since the early fifties the province has run a Rat Control Zone along the Saskatchewan border, six hundred kilometres long and twenty-nine wide, from Cold Lake to Montana. Owning a pet rat here is illegal. You report one by phoning 310-FARM. When the program turned 75, the agriculture minister, RJ Sigurdson, put the policy plainly: “We have a zero-tolerance policy for rats. If we spot an infestation, we quickly eradicate it.”

Calgary went out and signed one on purpose.

The rematch that wasn’t

The editor bought the ticket partly for the rematch: the rat against the guy with no nickname, at the Dome, with the standings counting this time.

Neither dressed. Ottavainen was not among Seattle’s six defencemen. Othmann was not among Calgary’s twelve forwards, who were exactly the twelve in the club’s projected lineup that morning, and defencemen Joel Hanley and Brayden Pachal sat as well. The editor, down at the glass for warmup, never saw 78. Before the anthems the scratches were introduced from the bench in street clothes, and from the top of the building the editor’s read was that Othmann did not look thrilled about it.

His parents flew in for this. On Tuesday he said it was the first time they had come to one of his training camps or an opening day, and that they are here until Friday. The Flames play their next two games in Vancouver and Seattle.

The goal scorer

Somebody had to go the other way on Monday, and the name that went is the one most of the noise was about.

Aydar Suniev is not on the 23. He scored both Calgary goals against Seattle on September 20, two on four shots in a little over fifteen minutes, and he had scored the only Calgary goal in the prospect game against Edmonton before that. Two days later The Hockey Writers ran a piece headlined “Flames’ Aydar Suniev Deserves an Opening-Night Roster Spot.” Huska said after the Seattle game: “He can shoot a puck. We know that. When he gets opportunities, it’s nice to see him have success. Three goals so far; he’s got all three.” Austin wrote that Suniev “had to stick around” and had “been too good throughout training camp.”

He was also the one of the two who could be moved without exposing him to the rest of the league. Suniev does not need waivers. Othmann does. That is not a verdict on which of them is the better hockey player. It is the reason the math went in exactly one direction, and FlamesNation’s Ryan Pike laid out the whole sequence on Sunday afternoon, a day before it happened.

The player who got the spot knows what the other one is going through. Othmann, on Tuesday, about his years in the Rangers organization, which he calls “my previous team” and never names:

“There was a few years, my previous team, where I was close. There was years that I wasn’t close. My first couple years I was close, last couple of cuts, and you’re right there, and when you get sent down, it stings.”

So Calgary kept the rat, left the goal scorer off the 23, and on opening night played neither.

Up top

The crowd took its own view of the officiating. Joel Farabee went off twice in the second period, for holding and then for tripping, and each time the replay ran on the big screen the building answered with a chant at the referees that will not be repeated here. By the back half of the period the frustration had spread well past the penalties.

A row above the editor, three young men shouted obscenities for two periods before their leader was walked out by two security staff, with two police officers behind them. A woman nearby then took on the other two, loudly enough that security began to gather for a second trip, until a friend of theirs talked them into leaving. For a few minutes the people around the editor watched the argument instead of the ice, and by the look of them it was the better show.

The CTrain back downtown after the final horn was not full, and nobody on it said much.

The walk from the station back to the car went through a stretch of downtown the editor used to work in, past the 7th Avenue store that has been a Circle K since 2018 and that Calgarians still call CrackMacs, and it was dirtier, and felt less safe, than the editor remembered.

The Flames are in Vancouver on Saturday. Whether 78 is in that lineup is the next thing worth watching.