The 2025 NHL Draft is less than a week away and the Calgary Flames, for the second straight year, own multiple first-round selections. They’re slated to select at 18th and 32nd overall.

The Flames have a pretty decent prospect base, especially after last year’s draft, but they’re lean on centres within their system. Heck, they’ve basically said as much. So, that means the Flames will be grabbing a centre in the first round on Friday night, right?

Speaking with Ryan Pinder and Dean “Boomer” Molberg on Barn Burner last week, Flames general manager Craig Conroy pumped the brakes on the notion that the Flames would be drafting for position over taking the best player available.

“If there was a player that we thought was elite, like, okay,” said Conroy. “Even if it was a winger or whatever position it was, and we said, ‘we have to, this is this guy’s too good to pass up,’ as much as you’d like to go for a position I think we would go with the thing with the player that we say, ‘how did he fall to us?’ Like, we have to take him, you know? And that’s our belief and obviously the other teams don’t feel the same way about him, but we do, you know, and that’s why we got to have strength in our conviction when we go.”

Conroy’s been pretty involved with the Flames’ draft preparation since he joined the club’s hockey operations department in 2011 following his retirement as a player. Generally-speaking, the Flames are a “work the list” team when it comes to the draft: a lot of work is done prior to hitting the draft floor hashing out the team’s preferences into a coherent list. So when Conroy says they “got to have strength in [their] conviction,” that’s likely a reference to trusting their list.

That said, trusting your list is easier when there’s a sense of what the teams ahead of you are going to do. And even more than other recent drafts, there’s a sense that a lot of different things could happen before the Flames hit the podium for the first time at 18th overall.

“I think there’s some good players in the draft,” said Conroy. “It’s where it’s what you’re looking for, what you want to do. This is a draft where we might know, usually we could say we kind of hit the list for like 20 to 25, you kind of knew who was going to be in there. I feel like this is a 10 draft and I don’t know how the order is going to go.”

Conroy expanded a bit, noting that teams might go after different types of players depending on their needs. So based upon that potential variation, yeah, it might be a bit challenging to project how the first round will unfold.

Asked about moving up in the draft order, given the Flames’ surplus of pick, Conroy indicated that it’s an option.

“I do think it’s there,” said Conroy. “I do think talking to different GMs and it’s there, but it’s going to be there at the day of the draft because, like I said, I don’t know how it’s going to unfold moving down. They said ‘we have a group of players of three players we really would like, but if they’re gone you know we’d be willing to move back.’ Because then then they kind of had a larger group where they feel comfortable with and they would like to add more picks, especially teams that don’t have a lot of picks.”

“As the draft starts to go down, I do think there’ll be opportunities,” added Conroy.

The 2025 NHL Draft goes June 27 & 28 from Los Angeles, California, with the 32 NHL clubs making selections remotely from their home cities.

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