It’s prospect rankings season at FlamesNation, friends, as we count down the top 20 Calder Trophy eligible players in the Calgary Flames system! The countdown proper will begin later this week, but given how tough it was to make our lists this year – we left some really good players off – we wanted to showcase some of the prospects that didn’t appear on any of our ballots.

We already broke down the first six, so here are the other six of the 12 Flames prospects that we couldn’t fit on our ballots this year.

A seventh-rounder in 2025, Leander seems a lot like Axel Hurtig, except a bit more raw in terms of his development. He’s big, he’s a shutdown type, and he’s probably destined to spend a bit more time in Sweden. We’ll see if Leander can take a step forward in 2025-26 and add a bit of offensive pop to his two-way game.

A fourth-round pick from 2023, Lipinski spent his Western League career as a really strong two-way player for the Vancouver Giants. The problem for Lipinski is that he just didn’t stand out in a brief AHL audition with the Wranglers early in 2024-25 and his development seemed to plateau as a 20-year-old in the Dub. He’s aged out of major junior, but he’s headed to the University of Maine, where we’ll see if he can keep building his game against more mature opposition.

Littler is the very definition of a long runway player. A seventh-round pick in 2022, he spent a couple years spinning his wheels in junior before heading to the University of North Dakota last season as a freshman. He spent the season in their bottom six, but seemed to find some traction and start carving out a role later in the season – he even scored some big goals down the stretch for the Fighting Hawks. Even with the arrival of the many CHL imports coming to NoDak, the hope is probably for Littler to take a bigger bite of the apple in his sophomore season and keep progressing.

Another late-rounder, Matveiko was a seventh-round pick in 2025, selected as an overage player. He’s big. He’s Russian. He’s seemingly a late bloomer and probably another long runway player. But he put up pretty decent numbers in Russia’s top junior league and took a step from his prior season. We’ll see if he can continue that progression, and perhaps even earn some KHL games with the historic Red Army club.

So, y’know how 2024 fourth-rounder Trevor Hoskin was a junior-A standout who moved onto a weak college conference, was a standout, and is headed to a better conference? Owen Say, a free agent signing by the Flames out of Notre Dame, did that as a goaltender. He spent a couple seasons in the BCHL, then a couple seasons in the relatively weak Atlantic conference, then last season played at Notre Dame in the stronger Big 10 conference. He kept improving and he posted good numbers at each level, so we’ll see if he can keep that trend going when he moves to pro hockey this season.

A sixth-round pick in 2023, Yegorov played well in his post-draft 2023-24 season but bounced around a bunch in 2024-25. He played for HC Tambov in the second-tier pro VHL and MHK Tambov in the second-tier junior NMHL, then joined Dynamo Moskva’s system, where he backed up for a game with the KHL team and otherwise spent the remainder of his time with one of their junior affiliates, the Soviet Wings, in the first-tier MHL. He’s slated to play with MHK Dynamo Moskva in the MHL to start the season, and we’ll see if he can grab hold of the starting job after being a bit lost in the shuffle last season.

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