What’s the goaltending succession plan?

When the puck drops for the 2020 playoffs, either David Rittich or Cam Talbot will be in net. When the puck drops for the following regular season (and beyond), the goaltending picture is a bit fuzzier.

What is the Flames’ goaltending succession plan?

Brad Treliving has been the Flames general manager since April 2014. In that time-span, he’s used 11 different NHL goaltenders – Brian Elliott, Chad Johnson, Karri Ramo, Mike Smith, Joni Ortio, Jon Gillies, Jonas Hiller, Niklas Backstrom, Eddie Lack, Rittich and Talbot. He’s also drafted, signed or otherwise acquired another eight goalies for their system: Mason McDonald, Brad Thiessen, Nick Schneider, Kevin Poulin, Tyler Parsons, Tom McCollum, Artyom Zagidulin and Dustin Wolf.

That’s a lot of bodies in a short time-span.

The Flames have six goalies under contract through the end of 2019-20:

Wolf is signed through 2020-21 but since he’s a junior-aged player his deal will likely slide and not begin until he goes pro in 2021-22.

The most common question I receive lately from fans and media types is “Hey, are the Flames bringing back Cam Talbot?” Because Talbot would probably require a raise to retain, which begs another question: is David Rittich going to be the guy for the Flames? And if he’s not, what is re-signing Talbot meant to accomplish? He’s 33 and is what he’s going to be.

Let’s put it differently: teams either have “their guy” in goal or they’re trying to buy time for “their guy” to be ready. if Rittich isn’t the guy, are they trying to buy time for Parsons to develop? Or are they stalling until Wolf is ready? Parsons’ development has been anything but linear and Wolf won’t be playing pro until 2021-22, and the odds of him being immediately ready for prime time are extremely low given how goalies develop.

This is a long way of saying this: it’s really unclear what the plan is in net for the next season, or several. Compared to other aspects of the roster, it’s a big glaring flaw that they’ll need to address or else they’ll have to do what they’ve done for the better part of the past decade: muddle along.