The 2024-25 season was Mikael Backlund’s 14th full season with the Calgary Flames, and 17th season with the Flames overall. Backlund entered the season as the Flames’ captain and their oldest player – he’s a year and a half older than Nazem Kadri, the next-oldest Flame.

The biggest compliment we can pay to the captain is that he was once again, well, Mikael Backlund this past season.

If you’re new to following the Flames, here’s roughly how Backlund has been used by various Flames coaches since around 2012-13: His line is typically hard-matched against the top line on the other team. They often have some of the lowest offensive zone-start ratios of anybody on the team – the other team’s top guns start in the offensive zone, so Backlund’s line chases them. Despite all this, Backlund typically has some of the best possession metrics on the hockey team.

And since Backlund’s line has the puck a lot, coaches can often put an offensive-minded player on his line and have them get a lot of scoring opportunities. There’s a phenomenon that’s been called “The Backlund Bump.” If you put a player with Backlund, they often see their possession and offensive metrics take a jump.

Backlund entered 2024-25 as a 35-year-old player (he turned 36 on St. Patrick’s Day). The big question was if he could continue to be himself and do his thing. More than any other player on the team, because of his longevity and success, Backlund has a really well-defined role on the team, on and off the ice. So could Backlund continue to be the team’s defensive conscience and leader for another year?

The answer was yes. Backlund was able to keep doing his thing in 2024-25. Based on Dobber Hockey’s player usage charts – originated by Rob Vollman – Backlund faced the toughest quality of competition at five-on-five of any Flames forward, and he started most of his shifts underwater in the defensive zone. He ended up having some of the best possession numbers on the team, particularly with shot and chance suppression.

Backlund and Blake Coleman were a superb 200-foot duo, and they found magic with Matt Coronato as a really effective line for a good chunk of the season. But Backlund and Coleman also played significant portions of the season with Yegor Sharangovich, Joel Farabee and Connor Zary, and had chemistry with all of them.

If you want to knock Backlund a bit, he wasn’t as effective on the penalty kill as he has been in the past. That’s not a Backlund-specific critique; that’s probably true of everybody that played on that side of special teams, and we did notice a jump in both the PK’s kill rate and their shot suppression stats in the final third of the season under Trent Cull.

At some point, the fountain of youth will run dry and Backlund’s game is going to drop off, right? Backlund will begin the 2025-26 season as a 36-year-old centre, and he’ll turn 37 before the end of the regular season. At some point, Backlund will become a mere mortal.

The hope is that if Backlund starts to have a drop-off, it’ll be gentle, gradual, and the emergence of other two-way centres in the team’s system will help adjust for it. The Flames system is currently quite lean with centres, especially those with Backlund’s 200-foot bonafides, so the Flames are probably crossing their fingers and toes in the hope that Backlund can fend off Father Time for at least one more season.

As it stands, Backlund’s the Flames’ go-to “tough minutes” centre until somebody else can do it better than he can.