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Looking back at the dismantling and legacy of the 2004 Calgary Flames
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Photo credit: Candice Ward/USA Today Sports
Ryan Pike
Jul 17, 2024, 14:00 EDTUpdated: Jul 16, 2024, 21:38 EDT
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The 2004 Calgary Flames were a unicorn of a hockey team. They were a group that was, self-admittedly, short on star power or elite skill, but utterly committed to a playing style that got them to within a single win – and a single goal – of a Stanley Cup.
On paper, they seemed incredibly well-poised to make a return to the deep waters of the Stanley Cup playoffs, with Jarome Iginla and Miikka Kiprusoff at the height of their powers, a supporting cast that meshed very well with Darryl Sutter’s desired playing style, and top prospect Dion Phaneuf waiting in the wings as a reinforcement.
The lockout changed everything.
While the 2004-05 lockout was instrumental in the continued existence of the Flames as a business entity, it couldn’t have come at a worse time from a hockey perspective.

Roster changes before the lockout

The collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players was set to expire on Sept. 15, 2004, and that looming deadline was in the background as teams scrambled to get their business done before the lockout began. Two big moves happened for the Flames, one in reaction to the other.
On July 6, first-line centre Craig Conroy joined the Los Angeles Kings as a free agent. About seven weeks later, in late August, the Flames attempted to fill Conroy’s void when they traded Oleg Saprykin and Denis Gauthier to the Phoenix Coyotes in exchange for Daymond Langkow. (Gauthier had re-upped with the Flames earlier that month.)

Roster changes after the lockout

The lockout finally ended on July 22, 2005. Between the end of the lockout and the first game of the 2005-06 regular season (Oct. 5), the Flames made even more changes:
  • Martin Gelinas (Florida), Ville Nieminen (NY Rangers) and Dean McAmmond (St. Louis) signed elsewhere as free agents.
  • Roman Turek and Dave Lowry retired from the NHL. (Turek remained active in Europe, while Lowry jumped right into coaching.)
  • Mike Commodore (Carolina), Chris Clark (Washington) and Toni Lydman (Buffalo) were all traded for draft picks.
When the Flames finally returned to meaningful game action for Game 1 of the 2005-06 season – 486 days after Game 7 of the 2004 Stanley Cup Final – they did so with an opening night roster that featured seven new faces: backup goalie Philippe Sauve, blueliners Phaneuf and Roman Hamrlik, and forwards Langkow, Tony Amonte, Jason Wiemer and Darren McCarty. (And Steven Reinprecht, who missed a big chunk of 2003-04 with a lengthy injury, was back in action.)
Sutter continued to tinker in-season, swapping Steve Montador and minor-leaguer Dustin Johner to Florida for Kristian Huselius in December, and moving Reinprecht and Sauve to Phoenix for Mike Leclerc and Brian Boucher in February.
The Flames had a strong regular season, capturing their first division crown since 1994-95, but they were dispatched in the first round of the playoffs by Anaheim in seven games.

The “new NHL” and the old

The 2004 Flames were a perfect team for that era of hockey. Yeah, you could basically bear-hug a player in the corner or functionally drag yourself behind an attacking player while hooking them and penalties were, well, inconsistently called. You could call it the wild west or the obstruction era, but under Sutter the Flames found a way to tailor their perceived deficiencies – they were a gritty, low-skill group – into a style that fit that era like a glove.
Following the lockout, though, the NHL decided to start calling the rulebook, and supplemented the existing penalties with additional infractions that slowed the game (and its skilled players) down. As a result, the game sped the heck up, and the “new NHL” (as marketing referred to it) was more up-tempo and entertaining than what preceded it.
The challenge for the Flames was that Sutter’s entire paradigm as both head coach and general manager was tailored to the “old” NHL, and as a result his moves for the Flames after the lockout lagged behind the rest of the league as other managers adjusted more quickly than he did.
Sutter continued his managerial tilting at windmills before he resigned as GM just after Christmas in 2010. He was replaced, ironically, by the GM of the Tampa Bay team that beat the Flames in 2004, Jay Feaster. At the time, the only holdovers from the 2004 team were Iginla, Kiprusoff and Robyn Regehr. Within three years of Sutter’s departure, they would be gone, too.
Four members of the 2004 Flames ended up winning Stanley Cups elsewhere in the years that followed: Commodore with Carolina in 2006, Andrew Ference with Boston in 2011 (giving his old Flames teammates a shout-out during post-win interviews on the ice), and Robyn Regehr with a Sutter-coached Los Angeles squad in 2014. (Sutter also won with the Kings in 2012.)
Tragically, Steve Montador and Chris Simon passed away in 2015 and 2024, respectively.

The echoes of the 2004 Flames

While none of the 2004 Flames remain active as players, their fingerprints remain visible across the hockey world.
Over a dozen 2004 alums remain active in hockey roles at various levels, including Iginla, Conroy and Martin Gelinas with the Flames, Shean Donovan in Ottawa, Clark in Columbus, Lowry in Seattle, Jordan Leopold, Brennan Evans and Rhett Warrener in high-level youth hockey, Gauthier in the QMJHL, Reinprecht in Germany, Lydman and Nieminen in Finland, and Turek in Czechia.
Five sons of 2004 alums have been selected in the NHL Draft: Joel and Adam Lowry in 2011, Jorian Donovan in 2022, Ethan Gauthier in 2023 and Tij Iginla in 2024. And there are likely more to come.
Iginla was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2020. Three banners hang from the Saddledome rafters that, in part, commemorate the 2004 run. Both Iginla and Kiprusoff have had their numbers retired by the Flames franchise, and a 2003-04 Western Conference Champions banner acts as a permanent reminder of the magical season where the club achieved more than most teams dream of doing… but unfortunately fell just a win short of their ultimate goal.

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