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The Flames’ best fights of 2025-26: Adam Klapka and Samuel Helenius square up in heavyweight tilt

Photo credit: Sergei Belski-Imagn Images

By Ryley Delaney

Jul 29, 2026, 10:00 EDTUpdated: Jul 29, 2026, 09:55 EDT

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Long gone are the days of common heavy weight tilts in the National Hockey League.

Hockey has changed a lot over the years and fighting in the sport started to decline in the late 1990s. By the early 2010s, the franchises across the league started to construct their roster focusing on skill over toughness. On occasion, you’ll find a player who can do both.

Standing at 6’8”, 235 lbs, Czech right wing Adam Klapka has shown a bit of both since he got regular playing time the past two years. Undrafted, he came to North America in 2022-23, scoring 13 goals and 25 points in 60 American Hockey league games.

In 2023-24, he scored 21 goals and 46 points in 65 games and made his NHL debut, then saw regular playing time in 2024. Over his 31 games, Klapka scored six goals and 10 points, even scoring one of the top goals for the Flames in 2024-25. He added 14 goals and 26 points in 33 AHL games. It was clear that the 25-year-old was ready to become a regular NHL player.

Klapka matched his career-high of six goals, but set a new career-high with 18 points, playing 79 games with 112 penalty minutes. At least 30 of those penalty minutes came due to a fight, including hockeyfights.com’s fourth-highest rated fight of the season, a tilt with Los Angeles Kings’ Samuel Helenius.

Unlike Ryan Lomberg’s fight against Colton Sissons, which we looked at last time, there was no build up to this fight. The 6’8” Flames forward dropped the gloves with 6’6”, 225 lbs Samuel Helenius in a heavyweight tilt on December 13th, 2025.

The two players traded right hands for the first few seconds of the fight, but Helenius was the first to land consecutive punches, forcing Klapka on his backfoot.

Klapka returned to an upright position, and the two players exchanged punches again before Helenius landed a few more ineffective but unanswered punches. When Klapka finally did answer, he threw the final punch of the fight before the linesman stepped in to break it up.

In total, 33 individuals voted on hockeyfights.com, with 29 of them awarding the victory to Helenius. This was likely because of the two sequences where he landed unanswered punches, but it was by no means a decisive Helenius victory. Overall, hockeyfights voters gave it an average rating of 5.27, the fourth-highest rated Flames’ fight and the highest-rated Klapka fight.

Klapka went on to have another heavyweight tilt toward the end of the season, throwing down with then Vancouver Canucks’ forward Curtis Douglas, who stands at 6’9”, 242 lbs.

With a blend of skill and size, Klapka has a chance to cement himself in the Flames’ bottom-six when the next great core arrives.

Ryley Delaney is a Nation Network writer for FlamesNation, Oilersnation, and Blue Jays Nation. She can be followed on Twitter @Ryley__Delaney.

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