The goal of every single NHL franchise is to win the Stanley Cup. How each franchise decides to work towards that goal is where things immediately start to differ across the league.
The Calgary Flames are one of the teams taking the approach of building their team culture around loyalty and doing right by their players. At its core, there’s nothing wrong with that, but when other teams are a little—or a lot—more relentless in their pursuit of the Cup, this philosophy can keep the Flames lagging behind other teams in becoming a competitive contender.
The Flames have faults in their front office philosophy
Now I’m not going to pretend like I know what it’s like to run a hockey organisation at the highest level—few people in the world have this privilege—but it is an agreeable statement that every front office has its faults and there is no single right way to run a hockey team.
I can go far back in time and list countless examples of mistakes made by Calgary. After all, the Flames aren’t unique in being the only team to be wrong sometimes. That said, how this team handles asset management can make for an all-time head-scratcher.
For example, the Flames lost their captain Mark Giordano for nothing at the 2021 NHL Expansion Draft, they threw in Adam Fox as a trade sweetener, and they lost Paul Byron on waivers cause they had to keep three goalies on their roster. The list goes on.
Brad Treliving’s final moves as Flames GM
Let’s keep things isolated to what might be defined as the current era of Calgary Flames hockey: everything that has happened after the 2021–22 season. Here’s where the Flames can look back and be more critical of themselves and learn from what other teams have done too.
Mismanaging Gaudreau’s free agency
One of their more recent mishaps was how they handled the pending free agency of the late Johnny Gaudreau. The Flames were so sure that they would be able to retain his services that they didn’t really prepare for the outcome that the one player in the league who has shown time and time again how much he values his family might very well put his family at the top of his priority list.
No one might have been more surprised that Gaudreau left in free agency than the Flames themselves. The Flames might have instead become the textbook example of what not to do, and other teams have shifted their tone accordingly.
Most recently, the Colorado Avalanche traded pending unrestricted free agent Mikko Rantanen to the Carolina Hurricanes in a move that shocked the player, his teammates, and the hockey world at large. However, Colorado took a situation where they could have ended up with nothing and turned it into tidy enough asset management—in the middle of a season where they are very much in the playoff race.
Doing things right by Tkachuk
With Gaudreau leaving, Tkachuk also wanted out. He had a prime opportunity to control his career and he took advantage of every ounce of leverage he had. As a pending restricted free agent, he took his position and along with Brad Treliving, facilitated the first sign-and-trade in NHL history.
At the time, the Flames took a difficult situation and turned it into a great outcome. With another star player wanting out, Calgary was able to find a willing trade partner in the Florida Panthers. In return, the Flames received Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, Cole Schwindt, and a 2025 first-round pick.
Tkachuk got everything he wanted on his exit. Meanwhile, the Flames received players who were convinced to extend with the team. However, the sense at the time was that Treliving panicked after losing two star players and rolled out the red carpet to get Huberdeau and Weegar signed even before they laced their skates for the first time.
As a small aside, the Flames also lost Schwindt on waivers to the Vegas Golden Knights this season.
On the other side of the equation, we saw Panthers GM Bill Zito pull off an all-time trade, shocking his own players to add a winner to the lineup. He saw an opportunity to change the trajectory of his team and he put loyalty aside to make a business decision.
Yes, it’s a tough pill to swallow for those involved. However, the end result was that Zito added an elite all-star who wanted to play for the team. When the team is winning and good times are had, the tough side of the business can be forgiven.
Monahan and a draft pick suddenly expendable
Back in Calgary, one month after the blockbuster trade, the Flames cleared cap space to sign Nazem Kadri. Not only did they send Sean Monahan to the Montreal Canadiens but also gave them a 2025 first-round draft pick.
We don’t need to go into this blunder any further than this. It was a doozy then and a doozy now, and the consequences are still yet to be fully realised.
Craig Conroy takes over
In the seasons that followed that earth-shattering 2022 summer, the Flames had Craig Conroy leading the helm. He’s had an alright track record so far. In particular, the team’s drafting has been superb, but the thing is, Conroy has yet to show that he’s great at asset management either.
Calgary’s big trades of 2023–24
Throughout the 2023–24 season and offseason, the Flames have sent out players like Elias Lindholm, Noah Hanifin, Jacob Markstrom, and more. The trades the Flames pulled off basically signalled to the league that they were rebuilding—even if Calgary was in denial or wouldn’t publicly say it.
In almost every case, in the days leading up to the numerous trades, it was confirmed that the Flames tried to extend virtually every player who wanted out.
Instead of reciprocating the loyalty the Flames offered, these players refused extension offers and forced Conroy to trade them. The Flames look vastly different now versus last year, but it resulted from player-led actions instead of the front office. If Conroy had his way, the 2024–25 Flames wouldn’t look all too different from the 2023–24 Flames.
The biggest thing that saved Conroy and the Flames from themselves was the fact that the players all wanted out so badly that the Flames couldn’t even reach offseason contract negotiations.
More attempts at keeping players around
Conroy has signed one player to a contract worth more than $10.0M and it was Yegor Sharangovich inking a five-year deal worth $28.75M.
Don’t get me wrong, Sharangovich is super easy to root for, and his first season with the Flames went as well as anyone could have hoped. That said, it is still a fair critique of the team to say they rushed to sign a player who put up career-best numbers across the board despite him having several red flags in his underlying results. The Flames overpaid to keep a player around and are now hardly getting any results from him.
Beyond Sharangovich, the Flames are once again caught up in their self-made web of wanting to keep players on the team. Andrei Kuzmenko was a name thrown around at the beginning of the season as a player to extend but he essentially played himself out of an NHL contract. Another player whose value might not be any higher is one of their top defencemen and yet the Flames are reportedly trying to extend Rasmus Andersson instead.
There are plenty of other players the Flames could trade to recoup assets for, and I guarantee you none of them have the same pedigree and level of play as Rantanen. So if the Avalanche can pull it off, why not Calgary?
Conroy’s unwavering belief in loyalty
Conroy has been with the Flames for a very long time. If anything, he is the epitome of loyalty getting rewarded. His own lived experience of climbing his way up to a general manager role thanks to his loyalty might be the very crux of the issue.
There is one player in the organisation that mirrors Conroy’s path. They were even teammates. It’s no other than Mikael Backlund, who became the team’s captain after committing over a decade and a half of his career to the team. Backlund will indeed go down as one of the all-time best Flames but from Conroy’s point of view, it might just be a data point that players want to play and stay in Calgary. They both represent genuine success stories and it’s hard to ignore how that might impact Conroy’s decision-making.
Look, I’m not saying loyalty is a bad thing. I believe that the world would be much better off if loyalty could be rewarded across the board. But in the microcosm of a top sports league like the NHL where every drop of competitive advantage is extracted and utilised, we still see both ends of the spectrum where there are front offices that treat winning more like a cutting-edge business and others much like the Flames.
Conroy has shown several times in his short tenure as general manager that he is willing to reward players for sticking around with the team long-term. It hasn’t led to as many contracts signed as he might have hoped for, but it’s basically public knowledge that rewarding loyalty is his favourite play.
Calgary needs a shift in perspective
Am I saying that Conroy needs to completely flip the script and become not only a general manager but a person that he doesn’t want to be? No. Not at all.
What I am saying is that Conroy and the Flames stand to greatly benefit both short- and long-term if they would start looking at their past mistakes and see that many times, the roots of the issues stemmed from their longstanding culture of putting loyalty above all else.
In fact, with the recent trade for Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee, one could argue it’s the first time that Conroy actually showed a bigger appetite for business and getting that side of the job done compared to upholding loyalty. Who knows, maybe the Flames have learned a thing or two from Colorado.
The NHL has shifted towards using data and analytics to make winning decisions and loyalty really does get in the way of that. The Flames need to find the balance that lets them build the culture they want to build but also have the flexibility to ultimately get the job done. If they don’t adopt a change in perspective, they might end up getting left behind.
