The Flames are finally finding a way to lose and that might be a good thing

Everything is going according to plan. Sort of.

The Flames are hanging around the bottom of the league and are the early leaders in the Landon Dupont race. While the organization waffled on whether to bottom out or “retool” for a while, the reality is they are on the tank path now. So whatever else happens on the ice, the ideal endpoint for the organization is the best shot at first overall.

There have already been some recent signs of improvement, but there have been no doubt some tight collars behind the bench so far.

• The most obvious surprise so far has been the netminding. Dustin Wolf is nowhere near his established performance level and has easily been one of the worst puck stoppers in the league, even when you take shot quality into account. He will almost certainly improve, but the idea that the Flames’ goaltending is “too good to tank” has likely been put to bed, although Devin Cooley’s recent performances have been exceptional.
• There is no reason to be overly worried about Wolf’s new seven-year, $7.5-million contract yet, of course, but management might start getting nervous if he can’t throw off these doldrums by the middle of the year.
• One of the under-the-radar surprises is that Calgary’s team-wide defence has been pretty bad as well. The Flames have been (relatively) good on the prevention side of the game under Huska, but through the early going, only the Vancouver Canucks have a higher (read: worse) expected goals against per 60 minutes of ice than Calgary (3.6 vs. 3.4).
• The Flames were seventh-last by this metric last season and 17th overall the year before. The floor fell out of the club’s defence after the trade deadline selloff in 2025-26, so to some degree we’re tracking the degradation of the roster. It will be interesting to see if this number improves at all this season, but we should expect Calgary to give up a lot of quality shots against, I think.
• One thing the team is doing well so far is getting pucks at the net. Through the Flames’ first eight games, only the Hurricanes and Devils averaged more shot attempts per 60 minutes at even strength than Calgary. The Flames are overindexing on volume over quality, for sure, but at least they aren’t spending all night in the defensive zone.
• It’s been a slow, but not a bad, start for Simon Nemec in Flames colours, if that makes sense. As a Devil, Nemec put up decent scoring rates but wasn’t good enough defensively to earn trust or ice time from the coaching staff. In Calgary, he’s riding shotgun with Kevin Bahl on the top pairing and putting up above-average shot and chance numbers. But he also isn’t scoring. Some of that is Zayne Parekh getting two times the amount of power-play ice time, no doubt.
• As for Parekh, the results aren’t quite there yet, but he looks far more comfortable than he did at this point last year. He’s regularly creating a handful of highlight-reel plays every game, just not getting rewarded for them. I’m not at all convinced that Jake Middleton is the right partner for him and, at some point, I suspect he’ll be moved back to the left side with Zach Whitecloud to recapture what we saw when he turned the corner at the end of last season. Parekh has played with Yan Kuznetsov for the last two games.
• For fans worried about the preponderance of blowout losses, here’s a way to think about things if this continues: The Flames have never been lucky enough to have a truly awful season when they’ve needed one.
• Every so often, a club takes it in the neck for a year. Their finishing is bad, their goaltending sucks, they get no bounces, etc. Even beyond what you’d expect given their possession, chances, coaching or roster. Sometimes Lady Luck just shoves a team down a well, and they get a super-high pick as a result.
• This has never happened for Calgary. No matter how bad the roster, the Flames always have some sort of run or turnaround that saves them from truly bottoming out.
• But … maybe this is the year. They say you have to be lucky to be good, but sometimes you actually have to be lucky to be bad. And the Flames need to be as bad as possible. For now.