The Flames still need a superstar forward in their pipeline

Daily Faceoff prospect analyst Steven Ellis ranked every NHL team’s prospect pool from No. 1 to 32 last week. He put the Calgary Flames in the No. 3 spot and wrote this on the team’s development system:

“No matter what level of hockey you watched, if there was a Flames prospect involved, they were typically one of the best players in the league,” Ellis wrote. “It’s still going to be a few years until the Flames are true contenders in the Western Conference, but this is a group that truly has a ton of intriguing pieces for the future, and there are already some good young core pieces in place, like Dustin Wolf and Simon Nemec.”

You can also read Ellis’ full story on the Flames’ prospect system from earlier this summer.

On last Wednesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton are joined by Ellis to talk about the league’s best prospects, and where the Flames stand as they attempt to build off of a disappointing 2025-26 season.

Tyler Yaremchuk: The Flames have a pair of star defenders in their system, and I think Zayne Parekh is going to be really good. I like a lot of things that they’re doing in Calgary … Dustin Wolf is a guy who four years from now, we could be talking about him being in Vezina Trophy conversations on a regular basis.

But when I look at what they need to get out of a rebuild … Matt Coronato led the team in scoring last year with 45 points. My fear for the Flames is that they’re missing that guy who can drive offense and get you 85-plus points a year. I think if you’re going to be a playoff team, you’re going to need at least one guy like that.

Do they have a superstar forward coming or is that still something that need to be looking for, or at the very least, something they need to be tanking for?

Steven Ellis: I think they still need some work where. I think Matvei Gridin’s actually going to be really impressive, he put up some good numbers in the AHL and NHL, last year. Cole Reschny, again, a lot of what he brings to the table is not necessarily putting 90 points on the season, but it’s being reliable in all three zones and being a tough player to play against.

The one real wild-card is Ethan Wyttenbach. You look at him last year, and he puts up 59 points in the NCAA as a freshman. Those are unbelievable numbers. You can say he didn’t play in a strong conference and he wasn’t putting up those numbers against high-quality teams, but he was doing stuff that nobody else was doing on Quinnipiac.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…