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FlamesNation Mailbag: Closing out 2024 with your questions
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Photo credit: Mike Gould
Ryan Pike
Dec 30, 2024, 16:00 ESTUpdated: Dec 30, 2024, 02:19 EST
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It’s been a pretty eventful year for the Calgary Flames.
Since 2024 began, the Flames have traded away five prominent members of the hockey club in an effort to get younger. Despite moving on from such prominent players as Vezina Trophy contender Jacob Markstrom and Selke Trophy contender Elias Lindholm… the Flames have hung around the playoff pack for much of the 2024-25 season, owing their resiliency to both their remaining veterans and several key youngsters.
As we ponder what 2025 could bring to the Flames, let’s delve into the mailbag.
Let’s call a spade a spade: you’re probably right. Right now the big hole in the Flames’ reserve list is at centre. In goal, Dustin Wolf seems like a good long-term asset. On the blueline, they have oodles of young players on their way. On the wings? The right side is a bit lean (Matt Coronato looks very promising), but the left side there are a lot of nice up-and-comers. If you have depth up the middle, you can probably manage games well. If you don’t have depth up the middle, you’re probably a bit more reactive and have to chase a bit.
The best place to find centres is the draft. The next-best place is to find them via trade, though you may have to (a) overpay and/or (b) use your strength in assets in other positions to build an attractive offer for another team’s second or third-best young centre. Nothing is free. High draft picks come after painful years, and acquiring via trade involves moving prospects that you really like a lot.
The key for the Flames eventually getting to where they want to go is finding the right centres to anchor their lineup.
The Wranglers are having yet another strong year. I would suspect among the contenders to represent the team at the AHL All-Star Classic in early February would be goaltender Devin Cooley, defenceman Ilya Solovyov, and forwards Dryden Hunt and Rory Kerins. William Strömgren would be my dark horse, but he doesn’t quite have the impressive numbers of the other four players.
The Flames are currently 29th in the NHL in face-off winning percentage. While that’s generally not a death-knell at five-on-five, it’s really tough to control the puck in overtime when you never start with it. They need to figure out how to win more draws in OT.
Or figure out how to win more consistently in regulation so overtime isn’t a concern.
Sean Monahan rules, and he was quietly one of the most important players of the post-Iginla era of Flames hockey. Honestly, getting him out of Calgary was probably the best thing for him; when he went to Montreal, he wasn’t in a win-now environment so I think he allowed himself to listen to his body and heal up more than he did in Calgary.
(And that’s nothing against Monahan or Calgary; I think the culture of hockey leads players to not want to let their teams down, and so if they think they’re the difference between winning and not winning, they’ll play through some awful stuff even when medical staff is doing everything correctly in trying to assess them.)
Anyway, moving Monahan probably was the best thing for Monahan, and that’s probably the most important thing. I’m willing to have the Monahan or Nazem Kadri debate, because they’re both good but completely different from each other in so many ways.
Got a question for a future mailbag? Contact Ryan on Twitter/BlueSky at @RyanNPike or e-mail him at Ryan [at] TheNationNetwork.com! (Make sure you put Mailbag in the subject line!)

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