By Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Shayna Goldman
Did any team outkick its coverage more dramatically than the Calgary Flames? At the start of the 2024-25 season, the vast majority of the hockey world saw a bottom-five roster. (Yes, that includes The Athletic; we had the Flames as a 79-point team, 28th in the league.)
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By the end of the schedule, Calgary had 96 points in the bank and missed the postseason on a tiebreaker. Two teams that actually qualified — New Jersey and Montreal — had fewer points. It was a great story, and it almost got another chapter.
That book, to continue the metaphor, has closed, and the Flames are running things back, for better or worse.
Let’s reset some expectations in Calgary.
The Flames probably aren’t a true talent 96-point team based on their roster. Hell, they weren’t even that based on their minus-13 goal differential, benefitting from a strong record in one-goal games.
What’s probably closer to reality is last season’s expectations: around 80 points. It’s a season of semi-competitive hockey that likely nets a high draft pick at the end of it.
Even ranked 24th, though, Calgary’s chances of being in the bottom five are just 27 percent. Just like it took luck for an 80-point team to hit 96 points, it’ll take luck for an 80-point team to actually be bad enough to hit the basement.
Projections are always tighter. The Flames have a higher chance than the 24th-best team, but actually hitting 80 points won’t do it. For the sake of the franchise’s future, some bad luck would serve them well.
How high can Dustin Wolf raise Calgary’s floor?
Way back in the autumn of 2024, during the peak of award prediction season, the Calder Trophy race felt like it was between two players. The Athletic’s staff voting is a decent barometer of that sentiment; 46 percent of us voted for Philadelphia’s Matvei Michkov, a supremely skilled winger, and 36 percent voted for Macklin Celebrini, the Sharks’ do-everything center and the No. 1 pick.
By the end of the schedule, Michkov had dropped from the top of the ballots, Celebrini found his stride, and Canadiens defenseman Lane Hutson had (deservedly) run away with things. Now — and this is a hypothesis — you could ask the average hockey fan to name the top two rookies of 2024-25, and they’d say Hutson and Celebrini. They finished 1-2 in the Calder voting, right?
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Wrong. Comfortably in second place behind Hutson, coming off a season where he did everything the Flames asked of him and more, was goalie Dustin Wolf. Nobody should’ve been surprised, either; by the letter of the law, that Wolf only popped up on a single Hart ballot was ridiculous. No rookie did more for his team. No goalie, outside of Connor Hellebuyck, was more important.
If you tried to sum up Wolf’s season with some stats, you’d have your pick. Here’s one: At five-on-five, the only starting goaltenders with better save percentages than his .926 were Hellebuyck, Darcy Kuemper, Andrei Vasilevskiy and Filip Gustavsson.
Here’s another: If Wolf was average, rather than a guy who saved about 25 goals above expected, Calgary’s goal differential would’ve gone from minus-13 to minus-38, down in the standings to the mid-20s with the Flyers and Ducks, somewhere around 80 points. Exactly, in other words, where they were projected to be. To say the Flames were better than expected wouldn’t be fair to Wolf. He was the difference. He is the reason they made it to the last day of the regular season with any sort of playoff chances. He was a top-10 goalie in the league last season, and he wasn’t 10th.
We know he’s capable of turning a team that otherwise wouldn’t have sniffed the postseason into one that came within a loser’s point — a random bounce in October or January or March — of actually making it.
The real question, though, is whether Wolf raises Calgary’s floor too dramatically, and the affirmative argument is persuasive. This is, after all, a team that seemed to, at long last, dip its toe into rebuild mode at the 2023 trade deadline. There’s nothing close to a franchise-caliber skater on the roster. There don’t seem to be any in the system. If Wolf is this good, the thinking goes, how are the Flames supposed to be bad?
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“He’s almost a problem for Calgary,” an executive told The Athletic over the summer. “It’s kind of like how Montreal struggled with Carey Price to understand where they really were. And the Rangers struggled with Henrik Lundqvist to understand where they really were. Dustin Wolf makes that team look really competitive. I don’t think that Calgary is very good and Wolf is fooling them.”
It’s a fair point that should leave room for one more possibility: That Wolf, 24 and a star at every stop of his hockey career, is simply a franchise player himself. It’d complicate Calgary’s road to true contender status, but it’s a nice problem to have.
Is Zayne Parekh NHL-ready?
Zayne Parekh already got one highly anticipated step out of the way: His NHL debut late last spring, when he played more than 20 minutes for the team that drafted him ninth in 2024. And he made an impact early, with a goal in his first game.
The next step is a bit more difficult: Carving out a full-time role at the NHL level and maintaining it.
Parekh has the dynamic offensive skill this Flames team craves. After putting up 96 points in 66 OHL games, he kicked it up a notch last year with 107 points in 61 games. His goal-scoring ability was a standout in junior, along with his playmaking and anticipation. But there’s a big difference between that offense translating in the OHL and the NHL, especially when there is still some defensive work to do.
The opportunity in Calgary is there for Parekh if he is ready for it. A player can be too good for the OHL and not yet ready for the NHL. There is no one-size-fits-all answer for player development; it’s an evolving process that has to be taken step by step. Parekh is a part of training camp; now he has to earn a starting role and go from there.
We already waxed poetic about Wolf’s game earlier, so this section is going to be a little thin. The Flames are pretty close to a one-man team. Still, there are some elements of the roster worth talking about.
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Calgary’s top six may not be anything to write home about, but the Flames do have the makings of a fairly strong third line. Assuming Morgan Frost slots in between Yegor Sharangovich and Joel Farabee, the trio would all grade out decently above average for their lineup slots. Last season, they only played 73 minutes together as a line, but in that time earned a 61 percent xG rate with surprisingly strong defensive numbers driving that.
What could spark a surge up the standings for Calgary is if all three could channel something closer to their 2023-24 selves. The difference between where they grade out now and where they were to start last season is worth roughly 11 goals, where the drop was mostly felt on offense — an area the Flames desperately need to improve.
Farabee’s points per 60 dropped from 2.25 to 1.05, Frost went from 1.77 to 1.25 and Sharangovich fell from 1.79 to 1.26. All three struggled to create chances to the same degree as the year prior, and the scoresheet dried up as a result.
That’s the difference between being an everyday top-six player and an OK top-nine option. While Farabee and Sharangovich improved defensively during that time, it came at too large an offensive cost. Finding the right balance is key. The upside is there, and if they can reach it, the Flames could be better than expected. Even if they don’t, though, Calgary could still have something real in a high-end third line.
Along with Wolf, it might be the only thing the Flames have going for them this season — unless Parekh sticks around and immediately jumps to a top-four level, that is.
Is it unfair to label good players as weaknesses just because of where they happen to slot in a weak team’s lineup? Maybe. But within the team context of that weak team, the problem usually is that the team’s best players pale in comparison to what actual playoff teams offer.
Nazem Kadri and MacKenzie Weegar can’t be a team’s best forward and defenseman. Not if Calgary envisions competing for a playoff spot through any methods other than relying on Wolf’s wizardry. The Flames are an entire first line and one true No. 1 defenseman short.
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To Kadri’s credit, he scored 35 goals last season and 75 points the year before. He’s great at attacking off the rush and creating chances. He just doesn’t drive play as well as he used to and turns 35 in October. The team around him doesn’t help, and in a different situation where he wasn’t the focal point, Kadri would probably thrive. Here, he’s going to lose his minutes, and it’ll only get worse as he ages.
His primary help in the top six — Jonathan Huberdeau, Matt Coronato, Connor Zary and Blake Coleman — would all be great options for a second line. Just not the top line. Huberdeau is not someone who can handle the heat, but he remains a high-end passer and bounced back nicely with 62 points last year. Coronato flashed some play-driving ability while scoring 24 goals, but he isn’t high-end enough yet. Zary is a useful defensive piece who helps bring pucks up ice out of his own zone, but the production isn’t there. Ditto for Coleman, an older version of Zary.
These are good players, but they’re not great ones, leaving Calgary unable to create an adequate enough first line — or anything close. That neither Zary nor Coleman grades out as above-average offensively is also a huge problem. The Flames have just three forwards who qualify, the fewest in the league. It’s the reason they enter the season with the second-worst Offensive Rating. Calgary is going to have a lot of trouble scoring goals, the same as last year when the Flames finished 29th with 220. This year, their average simulated goal total is 208.
On defense, we’ve long been Weegar fans — especially now that he’s an all-situations workhorse. His ratings are just a shade below average for a No. 1 defenseman with a difference-making impact felt at both ends of the ice. He’s good and he’s Calgary’s best skater, but there are cracks beginning to show in his game and a growing sense of unease around the league regarding his risk-reward profile.
Going back to his days in Florida, Weegar has long been one of the game’s best puck-movers — an all-three-zones beast. Over the last three seasons, though, that ability has started to slip, leading to a tough 2024-25 with the puck.
Weegar had a heavy workload in his own zone and exited the zone a lot, but he also botched a lot of retrievals and exits, according to Corey Sznajder’s tracking data. Weegar had 13.7 retrievals per 60 that led to exits, one of the best marks in the league. He also had 10.8 botched retrievals or failed exits per 60, one of the worst marks in the league. That’s not in the ballpark of other risky No. 1s; it’s comparable to sheltered players who are sheltered for a reason, like Tyler Kleven and Mason Lohrei.
That might be one reason Weegar didn’t play matchup minutes last year, and it’s probably the reason many inside the game wouldn’t be thrilled having Weegar as their No. 1 — despite his decent rating here. It’s worth noting that his ability to create chances has also dropped over the last year.
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Weegar is far from the problem, as the defensive depth after him is fairly weak — though Parekh does help give the Flames a potential top-four option. It’s possible Rasmus Andersson can thrive in a different situation away from matchup minutes. But his last few seasons have shown far too large a defensive weakness for a waning offensive ability to make up for; he’s just an average No. 3. His risk profile on retrievals is actually worse than Weegar’s. The rest of the defense, despite Kevin Bahl’s shocking new cap hit, all look like third-pair options at best with limited upside.
Across the board, there just isn’t enough at the top to push players into their most effective roles. It leaves nearly the entire roster depending on Wolf to bail them out. He can do it, but an actually good team wouldn’t have to rely on him to the degree Calgary does.
The Flames prove last year was no fluke, landing in the mid-90s again. This time, though, they make the playoffs. Behind another stellar Wolf season, there’s more substance thanks to breakthroughs up front and immediate dominance from Parekh.
Wolf looks elite again, but older players decline heavily without any young blood ready to step up. The Flames tumble to the league’s basement, but get pushed to the sixth draft slot.
Another playoff push won’t define whether the Flames’ season is a success; this is a retooling club, after all. Instead, the focus has to be on Calgary’s up-and-coming talent taking the next steps — whether those players gain seasoning in meaningful games, or in a year that lands the team a top pick.
References
How the model works
How the model adjusts for context
Understanding projection uncertainty
Resources
Evolving Hockey
Natural Stat Trick
Hockey Reference
NHL
All Three Zones Tracking by Corey Sznajder
(Top photo of Dustin Wolf: Sergei Belski / USA Today)
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