30th Calgary Flames win among the fastest in franchise history

On Monday night, the Calgary Flames beat the Winnipeg Jets by a 3-1 score.

The victory extended their winning streak to 10 games, tying a franchise record. But it was also their 30th victory of the season, representing the fourth-fastest the club has reached 30 wins in a season in franchise history.

(Note: in eight seasons, the Flames never reached 30 wins at all: 1972-73, 1981-82, 1994-95, 1997-98, 2000-01, 2002-03, 2012-13 and 2020-21. Three of those seasons were shortened due to lockouts or pandemics, but the other five were just years where the club wasn’t particularly good.)

Now, good news and bad news about these teams that hit 30 wins quickly.

The good news: of the 10 fastest teams to 30 wins, nine made the playoffs – and the one that didn’t is the current team. This seems logical, though, as winning a lot of games early is a great recipe for banking enough points to get that little X next to the team’s name in the standings.

The bad news: of those nine teams that made the playoffs, they won a combined six playoff rounds in three seasons (four in 1989, one in 1988, one in 2015) and suffered first round exits in the other six instances. As the theme will probably become in the back half of this season, regular season success means a lot less overall when it’s not followed by post-season success. And the Flames have been a pretty good regular season team at times in their history – sometimes a very, very good regular season team – but they haven’t had a ton of playoff success.

We’ll see if that story changes this season.

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