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The Calgary Flames need to embrace being a lottery team in 2025-26

Mike Gould
Mike Gould
Oct 23, 2025, 18:54 EDTUpdated: Oct 23, 2025, 19:20 EDT
The Calgary Flames need to embrace being a lottery team in 2025-26
Credit: Sergei Belski-Imagn Images

The National Hockey League’s official standings webpage shows the Calgary Flames as having 13 goals in eight games to start the 2025-26 season.

In reality, it’s even worse.

The Flames beat the Edmonton Oilers in their season opener back on Oct. 8, erasing a 3-0 deficit in regulation time before Nazem Kadri won it in the eighth round of the shootout. The NHL counts that shootout winner as a Flames team “goal for,” but not towards Kadri’s individual total, meaning Flames players have scored just a dozen goals thus far. And they haven’t won a game since.

Kadri has not scored an actual goal this season. Neither has Joel Farabee, or MacKenzie Weegar, or Yegor Sharangovich. Blake Coleman, Rasmus Andersson, and Matt Coronato are tied for the team lead with two apiece. Somehow, Kadri leads the team with four points — all assists — through eight games.

The Flames collectively scored just 225 goals last season. This year, they’re on pace to score 123. They’ll do better than that, but it’ll be difficult for them to get out from underneath their 1-6-1 start. Only the San Jose Sharks have been worse in the early stages of this season, and they’ve at least scored three more goals in two fewer games.

In Wednesday’s game at home against the Montreal Canadiens, the Flames outshot their opponents 27-19 through 40 minutes but trailed 1-0 heading into the third. Adam Klapka tied the game midway through the final frame, but that just set the stage for Canadiens super-rookie Ivan Demidov to take matters in his own hands in overtime.

It’s been a while since the Flames have had a young forward as exciting as Demidov. In the wake of Matthew Tkachuk and Johnny Gaudreau leaving in the 2022 off-season, the Flames embarked on an aggressive roster retool. In short, it didn’t work, and they’ve now missed the playoffs in each of the last three seasons. They’ve attempted to maintain a semblance of competitiveness over that span but, given their dreadful start to this season, it may finally be time for them to drop the pretense.

The Flames aren’t this bad, because nobody is this bad, but it’s not like they’re going to turn into the Harlem Globetrotters overnight once their 0.931 PDO improves. On paper, this is a team with a young star goaltender and not much else, and so far, that’s what they’ve looked like.

Fresh off signing a seven-year contract extension with the Flames this past summer, Dustin Wolf is doing all he can to keep this team in games. The numbers aren’t pretty, but it’s hard to imagine the team in front of him playing much worse. Of the six opponents Wolf has faced this season, five made the playoffs last year.

Wolf is the Flames’ most valuable player and, in theory, should be able to keep them out of the basement if and when they start giving him a bit more run support. But that’s an awful lot to ask of a 24-year-old goaltender playing in his second full NHL season, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Wolf fall into a bit of a sophomore slump under these circumstances.

What very much remains to be seen is how Flames ownership and management will respond to this terrible start. Owing perhaps to bad memories of the failed “Young Guns” era in the late 1990s, or the financial instability that plagued the franchise around the same time, the Flames have largely resisted calls to rebuild or “tank” over the last two decades. Instead, they have consistently remained on the periphery of the playoff picture — too good to draft high, not good enough to win anything of note.

While they’ve occasionally deviated from that trend in the short term — they made top-10 picks in 2013, 2014, and 2016; they won their division in 2006, 2019, and 2022 — the fact remains that the Flames haven’t advanced past the second round of the playoffs since 2004, nor have they ever made a single top-3 draft selection once in their 45-year history. In a league where most teams follow a sine wave, the Flames are a flatline: dead average. But a team can only tread water for so long before it starts to sink.

With all due respect to Wolf, Coronato, and Zayne Parekh, the Flames’ collection of young talent ranks near the middle of the pack relative to the rest of the league. They badly need a top draft pick, and 2026 would be a great year for them to finally get a No. 1. No other team is more overdue for a prospect like Gavin McKenna.

There’s still a lot of hockey left to play, but the Flames have all but cemented their status as major sellers already and it won’t be long before the rumor mill starts to churn out reports of potential suitors for the likes of Andersson, Coleman, Kadri, and even Weegar. At this point, it’s likely easier to list Flames players who won’t move: Wolf, Coronato, and Parekh, as well as Huberdeau, Sharangovich, and Farabee (no one is taking those contracts).

Speaking of moving, the Flames now have less than two years left before they pack up and relocate their operations from the soon-to-be-shuttered Saddledome to the adjacent Scotia Place, which is currently under construction and scheduled to open in time for the 2027-28 season. The Flames have publicly stated their intentions to be a competitive team from Day 1 in Scotia Place, but they certainly don’t look like one now. A couple blue-chip prospects would work wonders to remedy that.

The last thing the Flames need is to finish ninth in the Western Conference yet again, as they did in 2022-23 and 2024-25. There’s nothing to gain from being an also-ran; it’s time for the Flames to stick a “For Sale” sign firmly in the ground and commit to a proper rebuilding process.

If they do it right, they might just be able to open their new rink in style.

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