Less than 24 hours after a loss in Chicago, the Calgary Flames (5-13-3, 13 points) are back in action and looking for a bounce-back effort when they face the Buffalo Sabres (7-8-4, 18 points). The Sabres have played pretty well recently and gotten some nice efforts, while the Flames are a team that battles hard but lacks execution. Can the Flames get back into the win column, or will they drop both halves of this back-to-back set?

Today’s broadcast begins at 5:30 p.m. MT on Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 960 The Fan.

Projected lines via Daily Faceoff (with some guesswork):

Jonathan Huberdeau – Nazem Kadri – Matt Coronato
Yegor Sharangovich – Morgan Frost – Joel Farabee
Connor Zary – Mikael Backlund – Blake Coleman
Sam Morton – John Beecher – Adam Klapka

Yan Kuznetsov – MacKenzie Weegar
Kevin Bahl – Rasmus Andersson
Jake Bean – Brayden Pachal

We’re projecting Devin Cooley to start in net, backed up by Dustin Wolf. Tuesday night’s extras were Joel Hanley, Dryden Hunt and John Beecher. We’re presuming we’ll see some changes, given the loss in Chicago, but we’ll find out the extent of them at warm-up. Beecher met the team in Buffalo and, via Sportsnet’s Pat Steinberg, is expected to make his debut on a line with Sam Morton and Adam Klapka. (We’re assuming this means Ryan Lomberg comes out, but we’ll find out at warm-up.)

Tuesday night in Chicago was arguably the quintessential 2025-26 Flames outing. They looked decent. They played hard. They made mistakes at inopportune time. They came out on the bad end of a result. The Flames are doing some good things. Some players looked quite good – looking at you, Sam Morton – but they just lacked the skill or talent to out-score their mistakes or bad bounces.

The standings math is already bad and rapidly becoming dire. To reach 94 points, The Athletic’s projected cut-off for the Western Conference’s playoff race, the Flames need to go .664. It feels quite unreasonable to expect a team that went .310 over their first 21 games to do that.

Projected lines via Daily Faceoff:

Josh Doan – Tage Thompson – Alex Tuch
Isak Rosen – Ryan McLeod – Jack Quinn
Jordan Greenway – Tyson Kozak – Peyton Krebs
Josh Dunne – Noah Ostlund – Beck Malenstyn

Mattias Samuelsson – Rasmus Dahlin
Owen Power – Jacob Bryson
Bowen Byram – Conor Timmins

We’re projecting Colten Ellis to start in net, backed up by Alex Lyon. The projected extras are Mason Geertsen, Zach Metsa, Ukka-Pekka Luukonen. (Yes, they’re carrying three goalies. We’re not quite sure why.)

The Sabres have won back-to-back games, which came on the heels of dropping five straight (0-4-1). They’re kind of a weird team – that lineup is so very odd on paper – but their key players are performing. Tage Thompson, Alex Tuch and Rasmus Dahlin look legit, and while their team concept feels like a work in progress, they’re starting to gel as a group. As Edmonton recently experienced, underestimate the Sabres at your peril.

The Flames are without Martin Pospisil, Zayne Parekh and Sam Honzek.

The Sabres are without Josh Norris, Justin Danforth, Jiri Kulich, Zach Benson, Jason Zucker and Michael Kesselring.

This is the first of two meetings between these teams in 2025-26. They’ll close out their season series in Calgary on Dec. 8.

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