Friends, it goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway: if the Calgary Flames are going to transform into a really good hockey team, they’ll need to do some primarily through the draft.

The good news is that through three drafts under general manager Craig Conroy, the Flames have put together a couple drafts where the general consensus is that they found pretty good value relative to where they drafted.

The Flames have made 18 draft selections between the last two drafts: 10 in 2024 and another eight in 2025. How does the quality of the two draft classes compare? Let’s delve into things, using NHL equivalent point production – a metric that attempts to normalize each developmental league relative to NHL production. (HockeyProspecting has a good rundown of what NHLe is all about.)

As a general rule of thumb, someone having a 20+ point NHLe is having a good year, someone with a 30+ point NHLe is having a really good year, and anything 40+ is having a great year.

Well, in the 2024 draft class, the Flames found four players that had 30+ point NHLes in their draft year: Parekh, Gridin, Basha and Misa. (They got Misa in the fifth round because he’s not tall.) They also found two more players with 20+ point NHLes: Battaglia and Mews. And they rounded out their draft class with a promising goalie (Zarubin), a 20-year-old OJHL scorer (Hoskin) a big forward (Laing) and a 19-year-old WHL blueliner (Jamieson).

Almost across the board, the 2024 class took steps forward offensively in 2024-25 – or at least continued their strong scoring paces. Parekh had a 40+ point NHLe season. Five players had 30+ point NHLe seasons: Gridin again, Basha again, Misa again, plus Battaglia and Mews. Hoskin and Laing both took steps forward offensively, just narrowly missing out on reaching the 20 NHLe mark.

It doesn’t mean a ton until it produces NHL players, but a year later, the 2024 class is shaping up as one of the better draft classes (in terms of value and production) in Flames history.

In 2024, the Flames had six picks in the top 100 and found a ton of value.

In 2025, the Flames had four picks in the top 100 and basically tried to copy their prior year’s approach. They found one 30+ point NHLe player (Reschny), plus four 20+ point NHLe players (Potter, Stockselius, Wyttenbach and Lane). When you consider the Flames had fewer picks than 2024 and their picks were generally later, that’s quite a bit of value.

When you combine the 2024 and 2025 classes and look at how the draftees performed in 2024-25, there’s one 40+ point NHLe player (Parekh), six 30+ point NHLe players (Reschny, Gridin, Basha, Misa, Battaglia and Mews) and four 20+ point NHLe players (Potter, Stockselius, Wyttenbach and Lane).

The 2024 Flames draft class was a home run. They had a lot of picks and used them effectively. The 2025 Flames draft class isn’t quite as strong, at least it doesn’t seem so right now, but they used their picks pretty well given their slots. It was more of a solid double than a home run: still pretty impressive, and still able to move the runners around the bases, so to speak.

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