We’re more than a quarter into the season, with the Calgary Flames taking a 2–1 overtime win over the Vegas Golden Knights in their 22nd game of the season last night. Despite the team’s sluggish 9–10–3 start, a positive takeaway has been the impressive play of the organization’s youth. Rory Kerins—the Flames’ 2020 sixth-round pick—joins Connor Zary, Matt Coronato, Dustin Wolf, and Martin Pospisil as a reason for fans to be optimistic about the team’s future.
Kerins is a smaller forward—listed at 5’10” and 174 lbs on EliteProspects.com—who has shown he has the ability to score goals and set up his teammates at all levels of hockey through his young career.
Kerins spent the 2022–23 season in the ECHL
Kerins lit up the OHL to the tune of 43 goals and 118 points in the 2021–22 season. He was second in the league in points, bested only by the Dallas Stars’ Wyatt Johnston (124), and sixth in the league in goals scored.
Despite such a strong season, he spent the majority of his first season in professional hockey in the ECHL with the Rapid City Rush. Kerins played in just six games for the Wranglers in the first half of the year before being re-assigned to the Rush, where he scored 17 goals and added 20 assists for 37 points in 38 games.
Kerins was not in the 2023–24 starting lineup
Inexplicably, Kerins was not part of the Wranglers lineup to start this season. It took until Zary and Pospisil were called up to the NHL for Kerins to finally see his season debut in the AHL.
After not playing in the first six games of the season, Kerins began his season on November 3 against the San Jose Barracuda. He registered an assist and three shots on goal in that game and has not looked back.
Looking at Kerins’ productive start
Through 12 games, Kerins has scored four goals and added five assists for nine points. Three of his goals were scored on the power play, and two of them were game-winners.
| GP | G | A | P | SHOTS | PPG | GWG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 4 | 5 | 9 | 27 | 3 | 2 |
Kerins began his season with a five-game point streak, recording five points and 14 shots on goal over that span. After recording a helper in each of the first four games, he scored his first goal of the season in the final game of his point streak. That goal was a power play, game-winning goal against the Bakersfield Condors on November 14.
After his personal season-opening point streak was snapped, Kerins followed up with his first career AHL multi-point game—one goal, one assist—against the Ontario Reign on November 17. He would then record just two goals over the next four games before posting his worst line of the season in last night’s 7-2 loss to the Abbotsford Canucks: zeros across the board with the exception of a minus-two rating.
The rise of Rory
All players have cold streaks, and Kerins could be in the midst of one with only two goals and eight shots over the last five games. Let’s not forget Kerins is just 21 years old and this should be his first full season in the AHL.
At such a young age, he is quickly establishing himself as one of the Wranglers’ better forwards and is giving fans more reason to get excited about the future of the Calgary Flames.
If anyone needs one more reminder, see his tweet from when he was drafted here:
