What was the best Cliff Fletcher trade as GM of the flames?
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FlamesNation Mailbag: Delving deep into June with questions about the draft and more!
Photo credit: Mike Gould
We’re less than three weeks away from the National Hockey League’s annual entry draft, friends. The annual draft combine has concluded and so we’re likely to see draft hype continue percolate as the event nears, especially with the Calgary Flames currently holding many, many picks.
With that in mind, let’s delve into the mailbag!
There are a few trades from the 1980s stand out as big steps towards the Flames winning a Stanley Cup in 1989. The ones that really stand out, to me, are the Flames acquiring Rob Ramage and Rick Wamsley to St. Louis in exchange for Brett Hull and Steve Bozek, and six months later acquiring Doug Gilmour, Mark Hunter, Steve Bozek and Michael Dark from the Blues in exchange for Mike Bullard, Craig Coxe and Tim Corkery. I know the Hull trade is fairly unpopular, but getting Ramage and Wamsley was pretty important in terms of solidifying the team’s depth.
On a somewhat related note, let’s remember former Flame and longtime Buffalo Sabres executive Gerry Meehan, who sadly also passed away this weekend. Meehan played parts of two seasons with the Atlanta Flames – acquired by Fletcher mid-season from Vancouver in 1974-75 and traded to Washington mid-season in 1975-76 for Bill Clement – but his biggest impact was probably felt as the GM in Buffalo in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Ryan, in your opinion what’s it going to take for the Flames to leave the draft with Carels and Bjorck? Would you be willing to do that? I think getting those two would be a home run! Keep up the great work!
The challenge with drafting at sixth overall is that the Flames will have their choice of some really good players… but they’re players left to them by the teams above them. As such, if they really want Carson Carels, for example, they’re relying on hoping Carels falls to them – they don’t have as much agency in the situation as they might like to have.
Anyway, Carels and Viggo Bjorck both probably go in the top seven or eight picks. But they might only have the trade capital to move up to guarantee themselves one of them: they might have the ammo to move up to four or five from sixth, or to eighth or ninth from 30th or 31st, but probably not both.
What would you give up if the Flames were to trade into the later lottery? (Florida, Winnipeg, etc.)
If we’re talking about the Flames moving up from Vegas’ first-round pick at 30th or 31st to Florida’s pick (9th) or Winnipeg’s pick (8th), using PuckPedia’s Perri Pick Value Calculator, you would probably need to use up all four of the Flames’ second-round picks to make the pick value close to equal.
Will the Flames’ draft approach address glaring needs or best players available?
Will the flames draft by position or BPA? I’m hoping for Carels and the Ruck twins and I will be ecstatic
The Flames have historically been a “make a list, draft the list” team since around 2011. They have refined the criteria that determines where a player lands on their lists, but they’re predominantly a “draft the list” team that only really veers from the list in the later rounds when they look for particular types of value gambles. When you draft solely for positional need, you can miss out on good players.
Can you shed any light on who Flames took to dinner? I know that it’s probably all minutia anyways but part of the fun of following along. I thought I read Verhoeff somewhere. Any big Flames-related takeaways from the combine that have popped up for you?
Per our pal Pat Steinberg on the Friday edition of Flames Talk on Sportsnet 960 The Fan, the Flames definitely took Carson Carels and Keaton Verhoeff to dinner. But he also noted that the Flames probably took a lot of the top guys to dinner, those were just the ones that he was able to confirm happened.
With all the talk of Malhotra thsi draft, who do you think are the best father-son players?
Bobby and Brett Hull are, to me, the top father-son duo in NHL history.
Why are some people not happy to take the player that falls to #6, and insist on dreaming up ways to trade up? Asking for a friend. For me, I'm curious about what the @NHLFlames forward lines will look like in October. Your guess is as good as mine.
I noted it earlier on a prior answer: I think it’s just that the Flames would be getting whoever falls to them at sixth spot, rather than getting their ideal pick with a higher placement in the draft order.
As I understand it, teams don’t numerically list players from 1-210 in the draft but they do group them in categories. How many different groupings do you think there are in the first round?
In general, teams usually have a draft list of between 75 and 100 players they want, depending on the team and the draft year. They don’t usually rank all 300-plus players scouted by the NHL’s Central Scouting Service.
To me, I see Gavin McKenna and Ivar Stenberg on their own ledge, then a group of six (Reid, Malhotra, Verhoeff, Carels, Bjorck and Smits) on their own ledge, then a drop-off to Daxon Rudolph and Tynan Lawrence on their own ledge, and then a bit of a taper off from there. So I would say there’s about six or seven levels of talent in the first round mix, more or less.
Conroy was quoted as saying the Flames wouldn't be using all of their picks. Could you see them taking flyers on young players that may find themselves in the "buy low" category? Care to hazard a guess as to who some of those players may be?
Aside from chasing a potential top young centre, I think Craig Conroy would be more likely to use his picks to move up in the draft than to add more buy-low players to the roster. The team has so many bodies fighting for NHL minutes as it is, especially among the forward ranks.
What do you think of the NHL going back to 1-8 Playoff bracket, and would postively or negatively effect the Flames, hypothetical of course, just your thoughts and future of the Pacific ol Northwest Division.
Honestly, I don’t hate the current playoff format. When I was growing up the first two rounds were exclusively in-division with no wild card and I thought it made for tremendous animosity within the Smythe Division. I’d give the current format a little longer to build up some juice before I changed it up again. (And whether or not a pure 1-to-8 conference format would help or hurt the Flames would depend on whether the Flames’ division was weak tea or not in any given year, and that factor can change a lot.)
Stromgren, what is his future?
William Stromgren is a pending restricted free agent. He seems like a lock to get a qualifying offer and get a short-term deal with the Flames. At worst, he’ll be relied upon as a veteran presence for the Wranglers, but there might still be some NHL upside in his game.
Got a question for a future mailbag? Contact Ryan on Twitter/BlueSky at @RyanNPike or e-mail him at Ryan.Pike [at] BetterCollective.com! (Make sure you put Mailbag in the subject line!)
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