I wonder if Calgary Flames general manager Darryl Sutter is starting to feel the heat?

It’s the only reason I can come up with for the two blockbuster trades he pulled off earlier this week — sending Dion Phaneuf to Toronto for Niklas Hagman, Matt Stajan, Jamal Myers and Ian White; and then trading Olli Jokinen to the New York Rangers for Chris Higgins and Ales Kotalik.

The deal smacks of desperation.

It wasn’t merely reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic. No, they sold off their two biggest life boats for more deck chairs — and not particularly good ones either, they got the kind that are liable to snap under pressure.

Sutter gave a couple of reasons for the trade — scoring depth and cap flexibility.

Sutter said during his press conference after sending Phaneuf to the Big Smoke, that they can’t afford to have so much money tied up in three defencemen ($18.3-million combined on the cap between Phaneuf, Robyn Regher and Jay Bouwmeester annually). But he was also the one who put those contracts together.

Taking a close look at the Flames, their biggest problem has been their longest standing issue — finding someone to play with Jarome Iginla not named Craig Conroy — and that was not addressed in any real matter in either of these two trades.

Stajan is at best a second-line centre and is an unrestricted free agent this offseason. Hagman is a solid two way forward, probably the best overall player they picked up, but he’s a third liner who has the ability to play second line in a pinch. Mayers is a confounding addition for the fourth line and a UFA, and Ian White is a second pairing defenceman with a decent future ahead of him.

Not a first liner among them, and all with major question marks.

The shopping spree got even worse the next night when Sutter finally pulled the trigger on the Jokinen deal getting Kotalik — who still has two years and $6 million remaining on his deal — and was having such a great first season on Broadway that he had been sent home and told to wait for a trade. Higgins has been another wreck, but at least his deal is done at the end of the season.

That was their return 11 months later after sending a first round pick, Matthew Lombardi and Prust — he was later re-acquired by the Flames in the off-season for defenceman Jim Vandermeer — to the Phoenix Coyotes for the former all-star and a third round pick.

The optics look even worse considering the Flames tossed in defensive prospect Keith Aulie and 13th forward Fredrick Sjostrom in the Phaneuf deal and Prust in the Jokinen debacle.

The first deal has the potential to get real bad if Phaneuf does rediscover his form that made him one of the top young players in the game and routinely had his name thrown around with Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.

Calgary fans, as much as they grew to hate Phaneuf the last year-and-a-half, could very well look back at that trade some day and ask, ‘that’s all we got for a perennial Norris candidate?’

The other trade — really it was more a well orchestrated pick pocketing — was a complete embarrassment.

I am gob smacked to believe that was the best Sutter could have done.

It’s a panicked move a full month before the trade deadline. It took them out of any real conversation in the Ilya Kovalchuk sweepstakes, or if Vincent Lecavalier were to become available they now don’t have a real seat at the table, and the same goes for any other high end forward that becomes available in the next four weeks.

The Flames have been down right terrible in the new year, sitting on the outside looking in at the playoffs heading into action last night. The pressure was there to do something big and stop the bleeding, and this is what they came up with.

In the short term the Flames did get slightly better, the problem is they didn’t get good enough. Considering the teams they are battling with for that final spot — Detroit, Nashville and Dallas — there is no guarantee they will even make the post season dance, and even if they do it will be full speed ahead into an iceberg named Chicago, San Jose, or Vancouver and a fifth consecutive first-round exit.

Their fate was sealed with these deals, as may Sutter’s.