Calgary Flames, 2025-26 in review
212 goals. No team in the NHL scored fewer last season, and everything wrong with the Calgary Flames flows out of that one number. The record was 34-39-9, 77 points, seventh in the Pacific. Not a disaster. Not a collapse like the ones that hit other teams in the division. Just a club that kept showing up, kept staying in games, and kept running out of ways to actually win them.
The 77-point season, by the numbers
2025-26 record: 34-39-9 (212 goals for, 259 against)
2025-26 finish: 7th, Pacific Division
Leading goal scorer: Morgan Frost (22)
Leading playmaker: Nazem Kadri (29 assists)
Leading point producer: Matt Coronato (45)
Average roster age for 2026-27: 27.2
Cap space available for 2026-27: $14.88M
Offseason movement
In:
- Simon Nemec (D)
- Maxim Tsyplakov (F)
- Jacob Middleton (F)
Out:
- Ryan Lomberg (F)
- Victor Olofsson (F)
- Blake Coleman (F)
- Olli Maatta (D)
One contract still eating the payroll
Calgary: future contracts and draft picks
Both ends of the ice need help in Calgary. The offense needs more. Jonathan Huberdeau is signed at $10.5M a year through 2030-31, and the production has never come close to what he was doing in Florida. That deal sits on the roster like furniture nobody can move, a running reminder of how much a mistimed signing can cost a mid-market team. The blue line has holes as well, though nothing on that scale.
There is real work banked, too. Dustin Wolf is locked in through 2032-33, which settles the goaltending question for the better part of a decade, and Coronato and Nemec are both signed as the young core builds around him. Calgary owns a first-round pick every year through 2029. Solid. Not spectacular. And crucially, nothing in the contract structure suggests a teardown is coming. Which brings it all back to the same question: where do the goals come from?
Too good to tank, not good enough to matter
Calgary has been living in hockey’s grey zone for years. Too competitive to justify stripping it down, not dangerous enough to scare anyone in a seven-game series. Ryan Huska has a group that reads fine on paper and then hits the same wall every night: nobody finishes, and all the defensive work in front of Wolf gets thrown away.
The 212 goals say it plainly. The Flames could hang with almost anyone for 55 minutes and still lose. And that Huberdeau contract, signed in what now feels like another era of the franchise, keeps circling back.
Something has to break the pattern. Either Coronato and Nemec take a real step forward on their own, or the front office makes a move it has so far avoided. Without one of those, Calgary stays exactly where it is, not building, not contending.
Player to watch: Simon Nemec (D)
Nemec came over from New Jersey this summer with the label of a promising two-way defenseman who never got the minutes to prove it. Last season he was one of only three defensemen aged 22 or younger to put up at least 10 goals and 100 hits, alongside Matthew Schaefer and Lane Hutson. That is rare company for a player who spent much of the year fighting for a spot.
Calgary is handing him a much bigger role. Whether a change of address unlocks the rest of his game is one of the more interesting questions on a back end that badly needs someone to take pressure off Wolf.
What 2026-27 has to look like
Projected Calgary Flames lines, 2026-27
A team in a full rebuild gets to call incremental progress a good year. Calgary does not have that excuse. The target is the playoff race, and getting there runs through the goal column, because finishing last in scoring twice in a row would end any argument about this core. Huberdeau has to rebound. Nemec has to hold up in a top-four role. The young forwards have to convert more of what the goaltending and the defensive structure keep giving them.
My prediction
Another year near the bottom feels like the honest call. The Huberdeau money still drags on everything the front office wants to do, and the smartest use of this season is developing the kids rather than chasing a wild card spot that was never really there.
Photo credit: wallpapersafari.com | mferrell2
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