For the 34th season in a row, the Calgary Flames won’t achieve their ultimate goal of hoisting the Stanley Cup in 2024-25. Heck, for the third consecutive season, they’ve failed to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

But for the Flames, this playoff miss hits a bit differently than the ones before it.

In 2022-23, a year removed from winning the Pacific Division, the Flames missed the playoffs by two points.

The club had lost Johnny Gaudreau, Sean Monahan and Matthew Tkachuk in separate off-season moves and replaced them with Nazem Kadri, MacKenzie Weegar and Jonathan Huberdeau. The team never quite gelled, and both coach Darryl Sutter and general manager Brad Treliving departed after the season.

In 2023-24, the Flames were a team in transition and missed the playoffs by 17 points.

New general manager Craig Conroy inherited seven pending unrestricted free agents, which led to five major trades fr0m the 2023 NHL Draft to the 2024 trade deadline: Tyler Toffoli to New Jersey, Nikita Zadorov to Vancouver, Elias Lindholm to Vancouver, Chris Tanev to Dallas and Noah Hanifin to Vegas. The team hung in there, but the big-picture business stuff hung over the season and the team couldn’t quite overcome it, with a hard-working group having their roster depleted throughout the season.

In 2024-25, things were much different.

The final big roster questions left over from the prior season were handled before the 2024 draft, as Jacob Markstrom (to New Jersey) and Andrew Mangiapane (to Washington) were both traded. With no major question marks hanging over the team heading into the fall, the group that remained simply… played hockey.

The entire 82-game season seemed to be an answer to the question “I wonder what this team is capable of if they can integrate some up-and-comers and play without distractions.” Dustin Wolf and Matt Coronato grabbed hold of full-time NHL spots, joining Martin Pospisil and Connor Zary, who did so the season prior. And Conroy and the team’s leadership core, in equal measure, seemed to have no appetite for drama, and none really emerged. The team was kept pretty much intact all season, albeit with Andrei Kuzmenko and Jakob Pelletier swapped out for Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost.

After swapping out seven significant NHL pieces in a 13-month span, the Flames went into the 2024-25 season with a roster that featured a ton of question marks… and missed the Stanley Cup playoffs on tiebreakers. In 2022-23, the Flames won 38 games. In 2024-25, in the aftermath of a ton of roster turnover, they won 41. And in 2022-23, they spent $82.3 million against the salary cap to win 38 games, while in 2024-25, they spent $12 million less to win three games more.

To paraphrase John Henry in Moneyball: They lost Toffoli, Zadorov, Lindholm, Tanev, Hanifin, Markstrom and Mangiapane, and they won more games without them than they did with them.

In a vacuum, it’s impressive. In the context of the mess Conroy was left to clean up after when he became GM, it remains impressive. But while Flames fans are being implored to take a long-term view of the team’s build – Conroy has extolled the virtues to a three-to-five year build to contention – it’s important to recall the long-term context of the team, too. The hockey club has been yo-yoing up and down the standings since bottoming out at fourth-from-last in 2013-14, and they’ve been oscillating between impressing and disappointing relative to yearly expectations ever since. In this context, fan fatigue make some sense.

The 2024-25 season was impressive. The Flames wildly exceeded the low external expectations, and they hope they’ve sent the foundation for future success. But it’s up to them to find a way to build upon the past 82 games and ensure that it’s not just another data point within a decade marked by wild swings up and down the standings.

The 2024-25 season was a step forward for the Flames. If it’s followed by another, even a modest one, perhaps Flames fans will buy into the plan and fully put their faith in Conroy’s vision.