The AHL’s Calgary Wranglers have agreed to terms with veteran defenseman Derek Forbort on a professional tryout contract, the club announced Thursday afternoon.

Forbort, 34, rejoins the Flames organization after spending the previous two seasons with the Vancouver Canucks. The 6’4″ left-shot defender appeared in the first two games of the 2025-26 regular season with the Canucks before sitting out the rest of the year due to lingering hip issues.

The Flames lost veteran left-hander Andreas Englund to the Detroit Red Wings on Sept. 26, which created a big hole on the left side of their AHL defensive depth chart. With 552 NHL games under his belt, including a brief stint with the Flames in the 2019-20 season, Forbort was one of the most experienced defenders still in search of a job for the 2026-27 season.

Forbort was one of 10 defencemen named to the Wranglers’ 2026-27 season-opening roster on Thursday. He’ll wear No. 26 with the club.

Forbort spoke at length about how hip issues derailed his 2025-26 season in his end-of-season media availability with the Canucks in April.

“Yeah, kind of started before training camp,” Forbort said. “[I] was able to get through training camp with a Cortisone injection that kind of wore off. Ended up doing like a [platelet-rich plasma] injection in Toronto. Had a pretty bad reaction to that. And then, kind of once that calmed down, we were just trying to rehab. Tried a bunch of things, and then it just kind of got to the point where I had to get the labral tear in my hip fixed, and so I had surgery for that, and, yeah, just been rehabbing now.”

A first-round pick (No. 15 overall) of the L.A. Kings in the 2010 NHL Draft, Forbort just missed out on the team’s 2012 and 2014 Stanley Cup championships but did win the Calder Cup with the AHL’s Manchester Monarchs in 2015 before making his NHL debut with the Kings in 2015-16. Midway through Forbort’s fifth NHL season, the Kings traded him to Calgary in exchange for a 2021 fourth-round pick; the Kings later flipped that pick to the Carolina Hurricanes, who used it to select Jackson Blake.

Forbort appeared in seven games with the Flames to end the 2019-20 regular season and skated in 10 more in the playoffs, collecting a goal and an assist as the Flames defeated the Winnipeg Jets in the qualifying round before falling to the Dallas Stars in the Western Conference semifinals. As a free agent from the Flames after the season, Forbort signed a one-year deal with the Jets; he followed that up with three years with the Boston Bruins before joining the Canucks in 2024.

The Wranglers are slated to kick off the 2026-27 regular season at the Saddledome against the Abbotsford Canucks on Friday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. MT.