Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The Calgary Flames go into a season with every pundit expecting them to finish in the bottom ten. They defy those odds on the back of grit, tenacity, and a never-say-die attitude to make the playoffs. They do so on the back of young star players who outperform expectations and a young goalie who can win them games.
This feels a lot like the Flames this season, but also the 2014–15 Find-A-Way Flames, who were one of the best stories in recent Flames memory. While they didn’t go on to make it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, they did manage to win a playoff round and inspire a generation of young Flames fans.
This year’s team is in a similar position to the 2014–15 team. With just one game remaining before the Four Nations break, the Flames are 26–21–7. They are just two points outside of the wild card cutoff, with the Vancouver Canucks just ahead of them. Going into the All-Star break in 2014–15, the Flames that year sat 25–19–3 and held the final playoff spot in the Western Conference.
That year, the Flames were fighting with the Canucks and San Jose Sharks for a playoff berth, while this year, the Flames are fighting the Canucks, Los Angeles, Kings, and Utah Hockey Club for the final two spots in the playoffs. And while the Flames are very much in the fight, they should take a lesson from a decade past and still elect to sell.
Remembering the 2014–15 Find-A-Way Flames
The 2014–15 season was the breakout season for the Flames’ young stars. Sean Monahan had 31 goals that year, while Johnny Gaudreau had 64 points, tying Mark Stone for the rookie scoring lead. Playing alongside Jiri Hudler, the three players formed one of the most dynamic lines in the NHL that season.
However, what made the team work was the hard-working grind that Head Coach Bob Hartley instilled in the team that year; they simply refused to quit, fighting their way back into games night after night. They were constantly being outshot through the first half of the year and were riding high shooting percentages from Monahan and Hudler, which many thought were unsustainable.
However, as they were in the fight for the playoffs, the Flames made two trades of significance as the trade deadline approached. They started by moving pending unrestricted free agent Curtis Glencross to the Washington Capitals for a second and a third-round pick. The Flames would then move both of those picks, moving the former as part of the acquisition of Dougie Hamilton, then the latter to move up to select defenceman Oliver Kylington. The Glencross trade tree is still paying dividends for the Flames to this day, more than a decade later.
Just a day later, the Flames would trade Sven Baertschi to their division-rival Vancouver Canucks for a second-round pick. This pick would end up becoming Rasmus Andersson. While, at the time, that could have become anything, the fact that it became a top-pairing blue liner isn’t bad at all.
However, what is most notable is that the Flames didn’t make deals to make themselves better in the short term but to augment the team’s long-term future. Andersson wouldn’t make his NHL debut until the 2016–17 season and didn’t become a fixture until 2018–19, four years later.
Hamilton would make an immediate impact as a top defenceman, but his real legacy was his trade tree, which turned him into Elias Lindholm and Noah Hanifin, which turned into Andrei Kuzmenko, Daniil Miromanov, Hunter Brzustewicz, Matvei Gridin, and a handful of other picks. The Flames then moved Kuzmenko and Jakob Pelletier to turn them into Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee, who are both already having an impact in the lineup.
How can the Calgary Flames replicate this success?
The Flames have a few players who are hitting the peak of their value and could be traded for a large package to a contending team. Nazem Kadri and Rasmus Andersson are two that immediately come to mind. And while the Flames have said that their preference is to hold on to both players, they would be wise to move one, if not both.
Andersson has just one more year left on his contract that pays him a bargain basement price of $4.55M. Any contending team would be lucky to acquire a top-four defenceman at that price and a player who is a personality that will sell jerseys off the ice.
Not only is Kadri a centreman, something teams around the league prioritize, but he is a Stanley Cup winner who has shown a willingness to battle through injuries and put his body on the line when the chips are down. He’s the type of player that GMs want in their room, and for a team that needs a jolt, adding him down the middle would make a ton of sense.
While the Flames should not sell the farm going into the NHL trade deadline, they should be looking to offload players who have value to other teams in exchange for futures. Other names that the Flames should look to move if there is a market include goalie Daniel Vladar and winger Blake Coleman. Notably—and this should go without saying—the Flames should not be looking to move any of their young stars.
Looking back, the 2014–15 run was a flash in the pan. The Flames team was outperforming their underlying numbers and had some clear weaknesses that were being covered up by scoring, hard work, and good luck. The lack of an elite goaltender and a right winger for Gaudreau and Monahan were both holes that haunted this franchise for the better part of seven years.
While they made the right moves that season by moving on from Glencross and Baertschi, the team then pushed some chips into the middle, spending an exorbitant amount of draft capital on Dougie Hamilton from the Boston Bruins. While the Bruins blew that on picks that did not pan out, the Flames could have done better with the draft picks in the long run.
The message in this is that building a contender takes time, and even though what the Flames call a “re-tool,” moving on too quickly from the reorganization phase to the contending phase is a recipe for failure. Right now, the Flames have a lot of really good pieces in the organization, including several high-end wingers, a few very good offensive defencemen, and an outstanding netminder in Dustin Wolf. However, they do not have a game-breaking forward like they did in Gaudreau or an elite offensive centreman like they did in Monahan. As good as Connor Zary and Matt Coronato are, they are not at that level of talent.
This is a chance for the Flames to let their young players just play out the year while also acquiring even more future capital in exchange for their older stars, who will see their value drop off as they age. If the Flames make the playoffs on the back of Wolf, Zary, and Coronato, amazing. Give the players some playoff experience, and if they miss but end up with higher draft picks, that’s okay as well. But holding on to aging assets and praying to win a round in the playoffs without looking beyond this season is a recipe for disaster.
Photo by Sergei Belski/USA TODAY Sports
