Reporting for camp 🫡 🔗: cflam.es/4xwc2UF
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How much should we read into the Flames training camp groupings?
Photo credit: Sergei Belski-Imagn Images
The Calgary Flames will begin the main portion of training camp on Thursday morning, hitting the ice for the first time with the more veteran group.
The Flames have 52 players listed on their camp roster, split into two groupings that are pretty close to even in terms of numbers of bodies… but aren’t quite the same in terms of who is in each group.
Team Red
Team Red, skating earlier in the morning, has 25 players allotted.
- 2 goalies: Dustin Wolf and Devin Cooley
- 8 defencemen: Kevin Bahl, Joel Hanley, Yan Kuznetsov, Jacob Middleton, Simon Nemec, Brayden Pachal, Zayne Parekh and Zach Whitecloud
- 15 forwards*: Mikael Backlund, Matt Coronato, Joel Farabee, Morgan Frost, Matvei Gridin, Chase Harrington, Sam Honzek, Jonathan Huberdeau*, Adam Klapka, Alex Nylander, Martin Pospisil, Yegor Sharangovich, Ryan Strome, Maxim Tsyplakov and Connor Zary
The first group features 20 players on one-way NHL deals, three players on entry-level deals that are effectively roster locks, try-out forward Alex Nylander, and junior forward Chase Harrington. On paper, this is the incumbent NHL group.
Harrington will be headed back to junior in a little while so he can begin his season with Spokane, but at the very least he’s getting a weekend in main camp as a nice reward for a good showing in prospects training camp.
Team Black
Skating later in the mornings, Team Black has 27 players listed:
- 4 goalies: Semyon Konopsky, Owen Say, Arsenii Sergeev and Kirill Zarubin
- 8 defencemen: Kent Anderson, Mike Benning, Hunter Brzustewicz, Andreas Englund, Axel Hurtig, Jake Livingstone, Abram Wiebe and Kyle Walker
- 15 forwards*: Andrew Basha, Ryder Boulton, Jonathan Castagna, Will Dineen, Alex Gallant, Tyson Gross, Dryden Hunt, Ben Jones, Rory Kerins, Sam Morton, Brennan Othmann*, Luke Philp, William Stromgren, Aydar Suniev and Carter Wilkie
Of note: this group contains 17 players on two-way NHL deals, nine players on AHL deals, and Othmann, who’s an unsigned restricted free agent. On paper, this is the AHL group.
Are these camp groups unusual?
Not really.
This is the first year of the shortened pre-season, which has led to smaller training camps league-wide. But for the last while, even when the Flames had upwards of 70 players in camp, the Flames have trended towards having a veteran group, an AHL group, and then a group of junior players and depth AHL guys.
When they’re working on systems and structures and tactics, doing so in practice groups surrounded by likely teammates makes a lot of sense.
Will the pre-season lineups look like the camp groups?
If you work backward, it’s reasonable to assume that the final pre-season game, next Saturday in Edmonton, will be pretty much the Game 1 regular season roster. The NHL regulars will all get one other game besides that one.
But we suspect we’ll see the NHLers sprinkled throughout the other three games, rather than squished into the second-last game. So what typically happens is we see a mixing and matching of NHL and AHL forward lines and defensive pairings in the three earlier pre-season games.
We’ll see if anybody from Team Black can impress and force their way into Team Red.
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