The Athletic’s modelling had the Flames finished 28th overall with 78.9 points, and it was not an outlier. The betting markets set their over/under for points at 81.5. Having endured a season that saw the club part ways with Nikita Zadorov, Elias Lindholm, Chris Tanev and Noah Hanifin, and an off-season that saw Jacob Markstrom and Andrew Mangiapane traded too, most prognosticators gave the Flames a single-digit percentage chance at making the post-season.

82 games later, the Flames lost to the St. Louis Blues on the regulation wins tiebreaker for the final playoff spot in the Western Conference.

Our colleague Ryan Pinder, of the Barn Burner podcast, often used the term “peak pain” to describe the type of season the Flames just had. On one hand, yeah, the Flames did make a lot of people that predicted that they would suck look pretty foolish, finishing with 96 points – between 15 and 20 points more than anybody thought they’d get.

On the other hand: 96 points was not enough to play past Game 82, and they hit the golf course just as early as teams that really struggled like Chicago and San Jose. (And to add insult to injury, they finished well outside of the draft lottery mix… and then had to surrender their first-round pick to Montreal to close out the Sean Monahan trade.)

During their exit interviews with the media following the regular season, the message from pretty much everyone was pretty consistent and had two prongs:

The Flames were so much better than anyone outside their locker room thought they could be.
The Flames weren’t quite as good as they thought they could be, since their goal was to make the playoffs.

Through some really good hockey, the Flames put themselves into a position where they would make or miss the playoffs by the narrowest of margins.

They ended up missing by the narrowest of margins.

If we’re going for a simple answer, the Flames lost the regulation wins tiebreaker to St. Louis because they lost to the Blues twice during the same week in January. But if we’re going for a broader discussion, they missed the playoffs because of a lot of smaller pieces of their game that needed to be a little bit better.

So with the Flames about to gather for training camp for the 2025-26 season, and the goal being to return to the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 2022, over the next little bit we’re going to be digging into several topics related to the Flames’ on-ice performance and examining how the Flames can potentially be a little bit better in the next 82 games than they were in the prior 82.

Welcome to Chasing 97 Points.

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