There’s a saying among the terminally online, and it goes something like this: every day there is one main character, the goal is to never be it.

The same thing seems to happen in the National Hockey League. There are some seasons where a team, sometimes a couple of them, dominates discourse. For various reasons, the Calgary Flames were a downright noisy team for many, many years. There was Bill Peters discourse! Arena deal discourse! Darryl Sutter discourse! Brad Treliving discourse! (Oh, and a pandemic!)

And more recently, there was the hiring of Craig Conroy as Brad Treliving’s replacement as general manager… and then Conroy being forced to immediately deal with seven pending unrestricted free agents during his first year in the job. In short: the 2018-24 period was messy and probably pretty exhausting to be a part of. The Flames were often the NHL’s main character.

In 2024-25, Conroy and the Flames seemed to make the choice to have a season free of drama. Per multiple reports, when the veterans showed up to training camp the message given to them was “Hey guys, let’s just play hockey and see how it goes!” And with the veterans on board with that approach – it must’ve seemed like a lovely departure from the prior drama – the Flames ended up having a pretty good season, narrowly missing the playoffs.

In the aftermath of Conroy trading away – deep breath – Tyler Toffoli, Nikita Zadorov, Elias Lindholm, Chris Tanev, Noah Hanifin, Jacob Markstrom and Andrew Mangiapane over the course of his first 14 months on the job, many in hockey probably wondered in the early parts of 2025 if he would jettison anyone from an overachieving team or reward the group by spending assets to bolster the team for a playoff run.

Instead Conroy opted to do neither, and it might’ve been the right move given the circumstances. (The lone “big” move he made was a January 2025 trade that saw the team acquire Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost from the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for pending UFA Andrei Kuzmenko, NHL bubble forward Jakob Pelletier, and a couple draft picks.)

When Conroy was hired in May 2023, two topics dominated his introductory press conference: the premise of the team getting younger, and the premise of not losing key assets for nothing. The trades he’s made have almost unanimously involved established roster players on expiring contracts going elsewhere in exchange for picks, prospects, or both. And while his quiet 2025 trade deadline period (and off-season) could be construed by some as inaction, you can also argue it was a pretty deliberate choice by Conroy.

From an asset management perspective, the Flames’ most compelling asset was (and remains) Rasmus Andersson. But Andersson himself noted that he had been “chewing on minuses” during 2024-25, and you could make an argument that moving Andersson at the low point of his market value might not have made sense. (Reasonable people can disagree on this stance.)

And from a people management perspective, Conroy also probably had some incentives to stand pat: managing a locker room that went through a lot of change over the past few seasons. Consider this: Nazem Kadri, MacKenzie Weegar and Jonathan Huberdeau joined the team in the 2022 off-season and then endured a disappointing 2022-23 season where the players’ relationship with Sutter seemed to go very sour, then a 2023-24 season where the team was actively dismantled on the fly (while the Flames somehow remained in the playoff picture). While missing the playoffs was undoubtedly a disappointment, it must have been refreshing for the locker room to have a year where they were allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits.

Yeah, the Flames aren’t where they want to be quite yet. Yeah, they have a lot of work to do to get there. And yeah, Conroy’s stated plan from 2023 to refresh the hockey club with youngsters remains a work in progress. But in 2025, Conroy seemed to stick to that plan. Or, at the very least, he didn’t do anything to suggest that he’s deviating from it. (Hand-wringing over the Flames’ direction and whether Conroy was staying the course dominated discourse in 2025.)

We’ll see if he can move things along a bit more rapidly in 2026.

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