On Monday, Calgary Flames defender Zayne Parekh captured a bronze medal at the 2026 IIHF World Junior Championship in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He also set a Canadian record for most points by a defenceman in a single World Junior tournament, missing the overall blueliner points record by a single point. He also was named to the tournament’s media all-star team.

Later on Monday, Sportsnet’s Eric Francis reported that Parekh would be rejoining the Flames during their road trip.

On Tuesday, just as Francis had said would happen, Parekh was officially recalled back to the Flames – he’s meeting the team in Montreal ahead of their first game of the trip against the Canadiens.

The 19-year-old Parekh was a first-round pick of the Flames in the 2024 NHL Draft, taken ninth overall. He’s put together a heck of a resume as an under-20 competitor. In addition to his bronze medal and Canadian World Junior single tournament blueliner points record, he set the Canadian single tournament record for goals by a blueliner, too. On the club level, he’s won a Memorial Cup with the Saginaw Spirit, had back-to-back 33-goal seasons and a 100-point season, both incredibly rare feats by a defender in Canadian major junior hockey.

After debuting in the final game of the 2024-25 season – and scoring a goal – Parekh joined the Flames full-time this fall. He hasn’t been amazing, posting just one point in 11 games before suffering an upper body injury off a hit from Chicago’s Nick Foligno in early November. That said, the entire Flames team looked out of sorts for the first five weeks of the season, so we’re not prepared to make sweeping declarations about Parekh’s NHL readiness quite yet.

Simply put: Parekh is an exceptional offensive blueliner at the junior level, essentially a hockey unicorn. And there’s no standard playbook on how to integrate a player like Parekh into the NHL as a 19-year-old because he’s such a unicorn. It’ll take some time, and some growing pains, for Parekh to fully integrate himself at the NHL level.

After all the moves on Tuesday, here’s how the Flames roster looks:

The Flames have over $17 million in cap space available to them. The Flames have zero open roster spots at present, but Brzustewicz and Stromgren are both waiver exempt and can be assigned to the Wranglers without going through waivers if the Flames need to open a spot.

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