On Saturday night in Edmonton, the Calgary Flames brought their Game 1 regular season NHL roster to Rogers Place to face the Oilers’ Game 1 regular season NHL roster.

The Flames did some good things but lost 4-1. Let’s call a spade a spade: on paper, the game was a mismatch – the Oilers have championship ambitions, the Flames are facing draft lottery realities right now. On the ice, it was also a bit of a mismatch, but much like in Thursday’s game where the AHL group battled hard against Seattle’s NHL roster, the Flames’ NHL bunch gave the Oilers a good fight.

Here are three Flames that stood out on Saturday night.

A year ago, Parekh was the most exciting prospect in the Flames system and we were all very curious how a 19-year-old season in the NHL would play out. The answer was… bumpily.

Well, Parekh is 20 now and he’s on the other side of a year where he was challenged in a lot of different ways. So when we say that, facing Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in their own barn, Parekh had downright swagger, we want you to get why that’s so huge for him. 19-year-old Parekh seemed hesitant and the Flames seemed unsure how to use him. The Flames seem pretty cool about letting 20-year-old Parekh cook, and he was incredibly fun to watch against Edmonton.

Yeah, he was minus-3… but there were other Flames on the ice when the three Edmonton goals were scored against his unit – Jake Middleton had a tough outing – and we’re willing to chalk up a few minuses here and there up to allowing Parekh to do his thing and learn and grow.

Oh boy, Dustin Wolf was really sharp in this game.

He gave up four goals, but he faced a ton of high-grade scoring chances and he was fully in his element, battling and trying his level best to keep the road team competitive in this game. He got virtually zero run support, and the goals against came on – in order – a front-door tap-in on a power play, a McDavid one-timer on an odd-man rush sequence, a slapper from the point with traffic, and a partial breakaway.

This game remaining close for as long as it did was a credit to the netminder.

We’ll select Adam Klapka as the best member of the fourth line, alongside Maxim Tsyplakov and Martin Pospisil, and the unit was probably the Flames’ best. Yeah, they were victimized on the second goal – the Oilers got McDavid’s line on the ice against the fourth line, which is never ideal for the opponent – but they did a really nice job playing a fast, scrappy game that kept Edmonton on their toes.

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