Better luck next year: Will Jonathan Huberdeau and the Calgary Flames find a solution?

The decline of Jonathan Huberdeau remains the most fascinating thing about this team.

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.

Even though the Calgary Flames overachieved during the 2024-25 season, to the point where they barely missed the playoffs on a tiebreaker, there probably should not have been much expectation for them coming into the 2025-26 season.

They missed the playoffs in large part to a lack of offense. They did nothing to improve it over the offseason. The offense, predictably, got worse.

A lot of their success in 2024-25 was due to an outstanding season from rookie goalie Dustin Wolf. Goalies are always impossible to project from one year to the next, especially when they are young and with very little resume in the NHL. Some regression had to be at least a concern. It happened.

Overall it is still a team going through something of a rebuild, and it is not a surprise they took a step backwards and were once again selling at the trade deadline and stockpiling as many draft picks and future assets as they can.

In other words: They did what everybody expected them to do this season.

Because they are clearly rebuilding, and because they do not have much going on for themselves in the short-term, the most fascinating thing for me regarding this team is the continued struggles of veteran forward Jonathan Huberdeau and what, if anything, can be done to get his career back on track.

The Flames acquired him prior to the 2022-23 season in the Matthew Tkachuk trade with the Florida Panthers, and the hope was that he could continue to give them a top-line scorer, replace the offense that they were losing with Tkachuk, and help them maintain some level of competitiveness. They signed him to a massive contract extension, signed Nazem Kadri in free agency, and still had every expectation to compete in the short-term. It was not an outrageous thought, either. You could see a path for it. Even though Huberdeau was older than Tkachuk, he was still just entering his age 28 season and was coming off a four-year run where he was one of the top point-producing wingers in hockey. He should have been expected to at least keep scoring.

But from the moment he arrived in Calgary, everything positive regarding his game just completely evaporated.

Even at his peak in Florida he was never a great defensive player, but there was no denying the playmaking and the production. He never found it in Calgary, and there were no shortage of theories as to why it went away. Coaching, the system, no longer having Aleksander Barkov on his line, his health, and the lack of other high-end talent around him Calgary have all been said to be factors at one time or another. Whatever the case may be, the bottom line is he is no longer productive, and now has what is looking to be an albatross of a contract.

It is almost unprecedented for a player that was as good and productive as Huberdeau was, for as long as he was, to just suddenly lose all of his scoring touch.

Between his age 25 and 28 seasons, he averaged 1.20 points per game, putting him among the top-scorers in the league. In the salary cap era there have been 14 players that averaged at least 1.15 points per game during that same age range. While the jury is still out on a lot of them for what they will do during their age 29-32 seasons (because they have not played those seasons yet), the players that have started to play into their 30s have all pretty much maintained that same level of production. Or at least something close to it. At a minimum they have mostly remained over a point-per-game.

Example:

Matthews, Marner, Tkachuk and Kaprizov will play their age 29 seasons next season. McDavid, Pastrnak and Rantanen will play their age 30 seasons next season and have already played their age 29 seasons. We will see what they do in those years. I am optimistic for all of them. Especially since pretty much everybody else on here has consistently maintained their production.

Aging curves are what they are, and players do generally get less productive as they get older, but not everybody and every type of player ages the same way. If you are starting from a higher point, and have more talent, your decline might still be extraordinarily productive.

That has been the case for everybody on here except for Huberdeau, whose production has pretty much been cut in half.

He was limited to just 50 games this season before undergoing season-ending hip surgery that he is hoping can fix what had been a chronic issue for him. He has already talked about how well the rehab is going and how that is creating some optimism for next season, which sounds good early in the offseason. Maybe it helps. Maybe it results in a reset for his career and a trip to the fountain of youth. But a 33-year-old that has seen his production slip this much, and is now coming off major hip surgery, does not exactly fill you with high hopes.

The Flames need it to work. Huberdeau needs it to work.

What went right this season