The Calgary Flames entered the 2023-24 season with a big existential question to figure out: would they double down on their existing core and re-sign their many, many pending unrestricted free agents… or would they go in a new direction?

Well, general manager Craig Conroy opted for the new direction and decided to get younger, which resulted in the Flames being one of the busiest teams for trades in 2024. The Flames made eight trades (executed in 10 separate transactions) in 2024.

We’ve decided to rank the Flames’ 2024 trades from worst to best. Because there’s so many, we’ve broken this into two parts.

This one wasn’t so much “bad” as much as… kind of an odd roll of the dice. This was a trade made on deadline day, after the Flames had already added blueliners Brayden Pachal, Joel Hanley and Daniil Miromanov. They carried eight defencemen after the trade deadline, including Okhotiuk. (Ilya Solovyov was later called up in April.)

The fifth-round pick was acquired as part of the Flames’ trade with Vancouver in November for Nikita Zadorov. Okhotiuk ended up signing this off-season back in Russia. Fifth-rounders generally have a pretty low chance of playing any NHL games, so using the pick to acquire a player that played nine games and then peaced out back to Russia isn’t the worst thing they could have done. But in the context of the team starting their retooling process and trying to accumulate young assets, it might’ve been better to use this pick to roll the dice on an 18-year-old.

This was a minor-league trade, but you can kind of understand why it was made. Pettersen was a sixth-round pick of the Flames in 2018. By 2023-24, he was in his fourth pro season and his progression (at least offensively) had seemed to have stalled. Meanwhile, the Wranglers were looking like a playoff team but after losing some players to call-ups to the NHL, adding to their centre depth seemed like a good idea.

Damiani didn’t really seem to find his groove with the Wranglers and didn’t receive a qualifying offer from the Flames, but given the circumstances, the trade seemed like a decent enough gamble.

We’ll get to this later, but the New Jersey pick was acquired by the Flames as part of the Elias Lindholm trade. During the second day of the draft, the Flames moved that pick (107th overall) to the Flyers in exchange for the 150th overall pick and the 177th overall pick. Ignoring who the Flames drafted with those picks, adding more opportunities to grab promising youngsters in the first year of the rebuild is completely logical.

The Flames used the 150th pick to select forward Luke Misa, currently crushing it in the OHL, while the 177th pick was used to select defenceman Eric Jamieson, currently co-captain and defence partner to Landon DuPont in Everett of the WHL. So this trade is already aging well.

In the aftermath of the Flames’ 2024 trade deadline sweepstakes, the Flames headed into the summer with a couple looming questions. One of them was Mangiapane, who had a year left on his deal and on-lookers looking at his situation wondering if he was more of a fit with the Old Flames than the New Flames coming off back-to-back down seasons following his 35-goal campaign in 2021-22 season.

The day before the NHL Draft, the Flames opted to make a move with an eye towards the future and opened up a top nine winger spot by moving Mangiapane to the Capitals for a second-rounder. There was no retention and no bad money (or contracts) coming back, so in terms of building in pure flexibility and getting futures for a diminishing asset, this was a pretty clear win.