When the puck drops for the 2026-27 season, the Calgary Flames will look much different than they did to start the 2025-26 campaign. Eight players that were on the 2025-26 opening night roster are now elsewhere, including a good chunk of the leadership group.

Which begs the question: who’s left in terms of the club’s leaders, and who will join returning captain Mikael Backlund in wearing letters for the upcoming season?

In 2025-26, the leadership group began as they ended 2024-25: Backlund wearing the C for every single game, aided by a rotation of veterans cycling through the two alternate captaincy As worn in each game. The rotation included Blake Coleman, Nazem Kadri, Rasmus Andersson, Jonathan Huberdeau and MacKenzie Weegar. (Ryan Lomberg, cited as the seventh member of the leadership group, never wore a letter, but didn’t really need one.)

Well, there have been changes since last October, pals.

After the trade deadline, with Andersson, Weegar and Kadri wearing different jerseys, the Flames added Joel Farabee, Kevin Bahl and Zach Whitecloud to the rotation – Coleman was a full-time alternate, joined by Farabee (at home) and Whitecloud (on the road). Bahl wore an A on a road trip when Whitecloud was briefly injured.

Heading into 2026-27, is defining a “new” leadership group as simple as merely relying on the players who previously wore letters? If we expect Huberdeau to be available from the start of the season after undergoing hip resurfacing surgery in March, then Backlund could conceivably be joined by four holdover alternate captains: Huberdeau, Farabee, Bahl and Whitecloud. The prior rotation typically involved a forward and a defenceman each wearing a letter, so that would more or less fit with who’s had As in the past and provide a bit of continuity for what’ll be a pretty young Flames group.

And depending on how the season goes, in terms of injuries or departures, we could end up seeing some “new” faces added, potentially in the form of veteran forward Ryan Strome and defenceman Jacob Middleton, who have both been cited as being “good in the room” in previous stops in the NHL. With the Flames returning a pretty young roster, and potentially adding some new faces from college at the end of the regular season, it might make sense to continue with a larger leadership group with an eye towards helping mentor the younger Flames in what could be a challenging season.