On the other end, Brandon Bussi got the second night of the back-to-back as projected, and he was fine without being great: 31 saves on 34 shots, .912. That doesn't lose you many games. The Hurricanes were also down another body. Mark Jankowski, whose goal against Winnipeg was a big part of the preview's depth-scoring story, was ruled out before puck drop. That put Hall, Staal, Jarvis, Jankowski and Nikishin all in street clothes for a team running on depth.
The game went the way the line score says. The 1st period was scoreless. The 2nd was a 2-2 track meet. The 3rd was all Calgary, 1-0. Morgan Frost had a goal and an assist, Yegor Sharangovich scored the other named goal, and Calgary held on through the final 20 minutes against a team that had been winning one-goal games all month.
Carolina outshot Calgary 36-34, so this wasn't a Flames team stealing one while getting buried. The shots were close to even and the goaltending wasn't, which is the margin in a 1-goal game. The preview said Calgary had to stay close into the 3rd. The Flames were tied going into it and won the period.
The preview also called discipline the swing factor and said the Flames would go as far as they stayed out of the box. The box score we searched doesn't tell us the power-play story, and it doesn't cover the Coronato-Backlund-Farabee line or Sebastian Aho, so we won't guess. For a team that had allowed 4 or more goals in every loss, holding Carolina to 2 is the stat that counts.
Calgary moves to 2-6-0 and has won its last game, opening the homestand the way it needed to. Carolina is 7-2-1 and 4-1 in its last 5, which is still a very good month. But a 5-game road trip with this injury list was always going to be harder than the win streak made it look, and the Flames found that out for them on night 2.