Depending on what side of the fence you are on, you may think the Calgary Flames 2024–25 season has either been a complete success or an absolute disaster thus far.
There doesn’t seem to be an in-between standing you can take as a fan without inciting wrath from one end of the fanbase. Overall, this has made being a fan that much harder this season.
With so much tension within the C of Red, there hasn’t been a time when the fanbase has been so far apart in terms of perception of their beloved team.
There is no “right” stance as a Flames fan
From my own personal view, this season has been a rollercoaster in terms of how this team is viewed. Going into the season, I had virtually zero expectations for this team and agreed that a top-five pick was all but guaranteed. After the hot start, I completely flipped to thinking that this team could surprise on the back of Dustin Wolf and potentially make the playoffs. After all, in the postseason anything can happen and those chances go up when you have a star goaltender.
But after the last month or so, the Flames have shown little to prove they are a guaranteed NHL contender and are floundering again between the last playoff spot or the last team out. With the team being somewhat dedicated to wanting to be competitive when Scotia Place opens, this positioning wouldn’t significantly help them reach that goal.
It would just keep them exactly where they have been the last few decades: not bad enough to get a star player, and not good enough to seriously contend for a Stanley Cup.
Now that is where this division is starting to become more contentious.
What to make of the Flames
Back when the Flames took on the Los Angeles Kings on January 11, we put out a social post saying that this team just simply ain’t it after they put forth a disastrous first period of hockey.
I love the #Flames but this team just ain't it
— The Win Column (@wincolumnCGY) January 12, 2025
Stop kidding yourselves
The Flames would of course go on to come back to win that game on the heels of a stellar Wolf performance.
We were rightfully roasted for that take. But never before did we get such vitriol from the fanbase for how negative of a take it was. This has happened a lot throughout the season, but never more so than that moment.
Many would say that if you are rooting for the team to tank to get a top draft pick, you’re not a fan and don’t deserve to cheer for the team. I think more so those fans want the Flames to have a good enough team to compete for a long time and actually have a chance at a Stanley Cup each season, rather than playing a guessing game year after year.
Those rooting for the playoffs aren’t incorrect either, because the team could still absolutely make it. But if the team does underperform and ends up with a middle-of-the-pack draft pick again that doesn’t pan out, that is the cost of rooting for this iteration of the team at this current moment.
Looking back to the late 2000s, the team had a star goaltender in Miikka Kiprusoff and a star forward in Jarome Iginla who theoretically would have given them a chance every single season. That didn’t always work out. The same notion could be compared to this season with Dustin Wolf, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
The lack of direction those 2000s teams had has started to rear its head this decade as well, and now it’s spreading to the fanbase where there is no collective approach to how this team should handle the present and future—leading to the negativity we are seeing day in and day out.
We’re all in this together
We have had our fair share of negative posts around certain aspects of the Flames franchise over the years, but we are also a collective group of fans who have different opinions on what the team should do. At the end of the day we all want the Flames to succeed and win a Stanley Cup, but how we get to that result appears to be different for everyone.
If there was a one-size-fits-all approach, then every team would be succeeding every year. Winning is hard, but picking a direction seems to be even harder. It’s time that the Flames and the C of Red find that one aspect that can bring everyone together, or else it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Photo by Brett Holmes/Icon Sportswire
