Peak pain. That is how many Calgary Flames fans would describe the outcome of the 2024-25 season. They weren’t quite good enough to make the playoffs. But they weren’t bad enough to finish with a top 10 pick in the first round of the NHL draft. The Flames find themselves in the mushy middle once again. It is truly is the worst place to be in professional sports.

People who follow the Flames closely knew that this 2024-25 team was better than the national media was giving them credit for. There were too many solid players in the lineup for this group to finish in the bottom ten. How they succeeded may have surprised people with Dustin Wolf having a Calder Trophy calibre season. I personally thought they would be a better offensive team and have league average goaltending. But it doesn’t matter how they got to this point, because they’re here.

The mushy middle is exactly where re-tooling teams end up. And that’s the path Craig Conroy has taken the Calgary Flames franchise so far. They didn’t want to rebuild. And they didn’t push all their chips in to make the playoffs. Even their organizational philosophy is in the middle.

Conroy iced a lineup that featured a lot of good players. There weren’t any elite players. But there was a collection of talent in that room that could keep the team competitive on a nightly basis.

Conroy said as much in an interview with Sportsnet’s Eric Francis in February of 2024.

Re-tooling on the fly might work out for Conroy in the long run. But what it does in the short term is prevents your team from finishing in the bottom of the NHL standings, which in turn means you’re missing out on giving your team the best chance to select elite talent in the NHL draft.

When you re-tool instead of rebuild, it means that you’re going to have to find other ways to acquire the upper end talent to make up your next core group of players.

The amateur scouting staff is going to have to hit home runs with their first and second round picks, and also find diamonds in the rough in the later rounds.

Conroy and the management team are going to have to take big swings on the trade market. It is possible to acquire elite talent this way, Vegas did it with Jack Eichel, but those trades rarely happen. The easiest way to accomplish that task is to pick in the top 10 of the NHL draft.

There is no denying Conroy has re-tooled this roster. His trades indicate such. Throughout the course of his tenure as GM, Conroy has traded out veteran players like Tyler Toffoli, Elias Lindholm, Noah Hanifin, Chris Tanev, Nikita Zadorov, Jacob Markstrom and Andrew Mangiapane. But they were not traditional rebuilding trade because he acquired NHL players in return to keep the team competitive.

Yegor Sharangovich, Andrei Kuzmenko (who he turned into Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee), Kevin Bahl, and Daniil Miromanov all joined the Flames as part of those deals.

On top of that, Conroy decided to not trade any more veteran players. Nazem Kadri, Blake Coleman, Mikael Backlund, and Rasmus Andersson remained Flames in an effort to keep the Flames a competitive team. And they were exactly that this season.

Had the Flames moved out two, three, or all four of those players, and not acquired NHL players as part of previous trades, we would be gearing up for the Flames to pick in the top 10 of the 2025 NHL draft. Even Dustin Wolf playing at the level he did this season would not have been enough to keep the Flames out of the bottom 10 of the league standings had Conroy executed on a full rebuild.

Keeping this team competitive might be good for the long term culture of the organization. Maybe the experience of playing meaningful games in March and April will help develop the young players on the roster. That’s great if that truly is the case.

But you don’t win Stanley Cups without elite talent. You can have the greatest culture in the world, but the likelihood of you winning without elite talent is slim to none.

The Flames have to stop being in the mushy middle. The majority of the fan base is sick and tired of it. Trying to relive the glory of 2004 has to stop with this organization, and that starts at the very top with Murray Edwards. The mantra of “get in and anything can happen” is a foolish one. All it does is keep you in the middle.

Over the last 35 years, the Flames rank 27th in playoff victories with 52. The only franchise with less playoff wins who was also in the NHL in 1990 is the Winnipeg Jets/Arizona Coyotes. That’s it.

Since 1990, the Flames have made it past the second round one time and haven’t been past game 5 of the second round outside of 2004.

There has been zero playoff success.

When it comes to the regular season, the Flames are in the mushy middle. Since the 04/05 lockout, the Flames rank 14th in winning percentage, 14th in wins, and 13th in points.

I point all this out to say that Conroy needs to change the direction of this franchise. He needs to go from a re-tool to a rebuild. What is the definition of insanity? It’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The re-tool strategy isn’t working.

Calgary needs to bottom out for two or three years and accumulate elite talent they can build around. The 2024-25 season should have been year 1 of that process.

Dustin Wolf is a core piece. Zayne Parekh is trending to be a core piece. There are lots of prospects who look like they could turn into solid NHL players.

But the Flames need more than that. They need multiple high end centres. They need elite wingers. They need another legit top pairing defenceman.

There is a long way to go for before the Flames can emerge as a legitimate Stanley Cup threat. But the way to give themselves the best chance to collect elite talent and become that contending team is selecting high in the first round multiple times.

Stop re-tooling. And start embracing a true rebuild.