Better luck next year: The Calgary Flames overachieved, but what's next?

They need more offense, and they still have a huge problem with Jonathan Huberdeau's contract.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Calgary Flames.

The Calgary Flames also represent the last of the non-playoff teams for the series this year, and later this week we will start getting into the playoff teams that have been eliminated.

The Calgary Flames spent most of the 2023-24 season — and the following offseason — jettisoning veteran players, seemingly setting the stage for some sort of a rebuilding or retooling process to eventually begin.

Going back to the summer of 2023 and through the end of that season, the Flames traded away quite a list of veterans form their roster. The list included Nikita Zadorov, Tyler Toffolli, Elias Lindholm, Chris Tanev, Noah Hanifin, Jacob Markstrom and Andrew Mangiapane.

In return for that group they received a wide range of assets that included players and prospects of varying levels, and also a boatload of draft picks.

The full list originally included: Yegor Sharangovich, Andrei Kuzmenko, Hunter Brzustewicz, Joni Jurmo, Artem Grushnikov, Daniil Miromanov, Kevin Bahl, three first-round picks (2024, 2025 and 2026), two second-round pick (2024, 2025), three third-round picks (2023, 2025, 2026), a fourth-round pick (2024) and a fifth-round pick (2024).

As far as the players go, Sharangovich scored 30 goals in his first season with the Flames in 2023-24, but then took a small step backwards in terms of his production in 2024-25.

Bahl and Miromanov became regulars on the defense this season, but were not really needle-movers.

Brzustewicz is still a very intriguing prospect.

Kuzmenko had a brief resurgence late in the 2023-24 season after coming over from Vancouver in the Lindholm trade, before struggling again early in 2024-25. He was eventually traded to Philadelphia as part of the trade that brought in Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee.

Even though it was not a ton of short-term quality coming back, it was certainly a lot of long-term quantity, especially as it relates to the draft picks.

But this was already a team that had missed the playoffs two years in a row, and now it had spent more than a year doing more subtracting from its roster than adding to it.

It was not unreasonable to think the 2024-25 season could have been a painfully long one for Flames fans.

Instead of falling apart, the Flames ended up spending the entire season in the playoff race, actually made an in-season trade to add to the roster (Frost and Farabee), finished with 96 points (15 more than the year before) and only missed out on the postseason due to a tiebreaker with the St. Louis Blues.

They were RIGHT THERE the entire time.

So now what?

If you’re a Flames fan, I think you have to at least appreciate the effort and the fact a team you probably had zero expectations for held your interest all season and gave you a reason to watch all 82 games. That’s worth something.

But the end result was the same: No postseason hockey.

And while they still have multiple first-round draft picks, they had to send the highest of their picks (No. 16 overall — their original pick) to the Montreal Canadiens to satisfy the convoluted conditions on the Sean Monahan trade from a couple of years ago.

They now own the No. 18 pick (originally New Jersey’s as part of the Markstrom trade) and another pick somewhere between No. 29 and 32 (Florida’s pick, as part of the Matthew Tkachuk trade from two years ago).

It’s not a bad team. But it’s clearly not a great team.

There are good players still on the roster, but it lacks game-changers and impact players, while also having a pretty decent but not great farm system.

They still have two first-round picks in 2025, but they are not really the type of draft picks that make acquiring star-level players a very strong possibility.

That’s a tough spot to be in.

There’s a lot of “that’s good, but the Frogurt is also cursed” to this.

So let’s talk about it.

What went right this season

Let’s start with goalie Dustin Wolf.