Friends, way, way back in 2014-15, the Calgary Flames entered the season with few outside of Calgary expecting very much out of the hockey club. Heck, they had finished fourth-from-last in the overall standings during the prior season, resulting in them selecting Sam Bennett fourth overall in the 2014 NHL Draft.

But the 2014-15 Flames came into the season with a chip on their collective shoulders – imagine 20-odd guys rolling into training camp after reading about how bad they would be all summer – and bolstered by an improbable amount of late-game comebacks, they made the playoffs despite having some fairly poor underlying numbers. They ended up beating Vancouver in the first round before losing to Anaheim in the second round. The following season, 2015-16, the Flames took a step back in the standings and missed the playoffs by 10 points (despite improving their underlyings)

Well, not much was expected of the 2024-25 Flames given the many, many deletions from their roster over the previous 18 months. And the Flames ended up having pretty decent underlyings – not amazing, but not horrible – and managed to hang around in the playoff mix until eventually missing the playoffs on tiebreakers at the end of the season.

During exit interviews on Saturday afternoon, Flames head coach Ryan Huska discussed the growth he’s seen in his team over the past season.

“Probably in the way, I don’t know what word really to use, but the foundation side of things as to the way we have to play and how important it is to the team now,” said Huska. “So that aspect of it, there was a lot of growth from our team this year. They had the belief, we talked a lot about it from the beginning of the year, but I do think that the foundation for us to build on is now there. And now it’s up to us to do everything we have to do over the course of summer to make sure we’re ready to find a way to get more out of them next year.”

Later on, Huska explained about his confidence in the team’s ability to build on the foundation that’s been set in 2024-25.

“Yeah, I think we can,” said Huska. “And you look at, there was a lot made of our inability to score this year. At the beginning of the year, we weren’t generating a lot of quality chances. At the end of the year, our analytics show us in the top half of generating high danger chances for. The challenge for us is to find a way to make those chances count on the scoreboard. And at the same time is, I still think we have a long ways to go in protecting our goaltenders. Like there was a lot of nights this year where we relied on them far too often. And that means that we have to continue to take steps in taking pride and reducing the quality of chances that we give up. So that’s still something that we have to work on and get better because at the end of the day it’s one point that we’re missing. And if we can make improvements in a bunch of different areas, then I think we’ll find ourselves where we want to be next year.”

Flames general manager Craig Conroy was an assistant GM on that 2014-15 team. He was asked on Saturday what he can do, as a manager, to help the team maintain its momentum.

“You know, if there’s an opportunity to add something to the team that makes sense, age appropriate, the right position, you know, that’s what we’re going to do,” said Conroy. “We’re going to try to do whatever we can. But I think a lot of it is the culture that was and what these guys have done in that room. They’ve started the process. I think if we continue to go the direction we’re going, I mean, they’d want to play tomorrow if we could. You know, start the season, they’d be ready to go. We need that to come back in September and have them get off to the same start the way they finished this year. You know, so, I mean, I think it’s just about, for us, it’s about not giving them any excuses not to do well.”

Conroy added that he expects Dustin Wolf (and Dan Vladar, if he’s back) to be the best goaltending tandem in the league. Combining that with the foundation and playing style the team established this season, and potentially improving their offence, and you can understand why there’s some optimism among the coaching and management group going forward.

“We actually created more high danger chances, especially in the second half,” said Conroy. “We just didn’t finish a lot of them. So, hopefully, next year we can come in, create all those high dangers, and actually start scoring some more goals. Because if we score four or more, I like our team’s odds a lot.”