The Calgary Flames opened the 2025-26 National Hockey League season with a clear goal: to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

22 games into their schedule, it’s become abundantly clear: they’re going to fail to reach that goal.

The Flames are off to a 6-13-3 start, with their 2-8-2 October seeming to sink their playoff hopes before they really got out of the starting blocks. A .600 points percentage is the cut-off for a playoff spot in the Western Conference presently; the Flames are 11 points off the pace. The Athletic‘s projections have the cut-off for the post-season around 94 points, which would require the Flames to play at a .658 pace for the balance of the season. That’s probably not happening.

But that does not mean that the 2025-26 campaign cannot be a productive endeavour for the hockey club.

Following the success of the Apollo 13 feature film, HBO released a miniseries entitled From the Earth to the Moon, which told the broader story of the Apollo program and how they worked towards the moon landings. The entire narrative thrust of the mini-series that there were a lot of productive failures that taught the Apollo team key lessons that led to the successes of the moon landings. A handful of guys went to the moon, but it was a lot of hard work and hard lessons for a lot of people that got them there.

A similar process happens in the years leading up to a Stanley Cup.

You don’t need to go far on social media to see Flames fans calling for some veteran players to be traded away to recoup assets – picks and prospects primarily. However, my thought process is more along the lines of using the remaining games as a sandbox to experiment. What can the Flames learn from the remainder of this season that can help them move their retooling project along? What productive growth can occur, either for individual players or segments of the team, that they can carry forward?

You could argue that we’ve already seen the beginning of the “sandbox” approach when Yan Kuznetsov was recalled and put into the lineup. Through eight outings he’s played on every single pairing and seen a lot of different game situations. So far, it seems like there’s an NHL player there. Sam Morton was recently called up from the AHL and given a couple games and so far, he seems like he’s got some promise, too.

There may be a temptation to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, to trade away everyone over a certain age and start from scratch. But you can also understand the temptation to not do that. We’ve heard Ryan Huska and Craig Conroy talk about wanting to put young players into positions to succeed. And guess what? It can work. Kuznetsov has been playing with a strong partner in MacKenzie Weegar and performed well. Sam Honzek, prior to his injury, looked strong alongside Mikael Backlund and Blake Coleman.

So over the last 60 games, if playoffs aren’t in the cards, how can management and the coaching staff create similar opportunities for the organization’s younger players? We’ve already learned quite a bit about Kuznetsov and Honzek at the NHL level. We seem to be starting to learn about Morton. Who else can they work into the lineup?

It’s incumbent to use the remainder of the season to learn as much as possible about as many key young players as possible so that the 2025-26 campaign still be viewed as a productive year of Flames hockey.

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