When the Calgary Flames began the 2023-24 season, their blueline was, on paper, just an embarrassment of riches.

Sure, they didn’t have Oliver Kylington – he was away from the club for personal reasons – but their lineup card for opening night included Rasmus Andersson, MacKenzie Weegar, Chris Tanev, Noah Hanifin, Nikita Zadorov and Jordan Oesterle (with Dennis Gilbert as their seventh defender in the press box.)

The club’s depth at the position afforded Andersson with a great deal of stability in terms of his duties, deployments and partner. For the majority of the 2023-24 season, Andersson played primarily with Weegar or Hanifin. While that didn’t change much after Nikita Zadorov’s departure to Vancouver in November, the changes to the blueline after the Mar. 8, 2024 trade deadline meant that the last chunk of the season saw Andersson pushed into uncharted waters.

Think about it this way: Andersson played 46 games on the 2024 side of the 2023-24 season. He played 25 with Weegar, but the other 21 were split between Kylington, Gilbert, Joel Hanley, Ilya Solovyov and Nikita Okhotiuk – five players that, all due respect, weren’t as well-rounded as Weegar or Hanifin.

(Weegar, meanwhile, was basically attached at the hip to Daniil Miromanov after the trade deadline.)

In 2024-25, Andersson has experienced much more stability, playing almost exclusively with newcomer Kevin Bahl (acquired from New Jersey in the Jacob Markstrom swap). You can basically split Andersson’s 2024 experience into three bins: before the trade deadline (Jan. 1-Mar. 6), after the trade deadline (Mar. 6-Apr. 18), and the Kevin Bahl era (Oct. 9 to present).

Post-deadline, Andersson’s game was an adventure. Did he have decent underlyings? Sure. Was the team playing high-event hockey with him on the ice? Yes. And considering how much he played, that was a lot of high-event hockey played with a rotation of different partners. It probably wasn’t the best way to utilize Andersson, but he seemed to do his level best to make it work.

With Bahl, though we’ve seen a few games get away from them, Andersson tends to play a more structured, buttoned-down style of game. Less stuff happens with that duo on the ice, and that’s sort of the goal when you put them together and throw them against the other team’s top lines. (Are they helped by how often they play with Mikael Backlund’s line? Sure!) Nevertheless, Bahl and Andersson have done a nice job stepping into the tough-minutes void left by Tanev and Hanifin. Andersson plays a ton of minutes at five-on-five and he’s a major piece on both sides of special teams.

It’s also worth noting that Andersson has become an increasingly noticeable leadership presence with the Flames over the course of 2024. The departure of so many prominent players over the course of 2023 and 2024 could’ve created a vacuum, but Andersson – both in public media availabilities and the behind-the-scenes content shared by the Flames – has become noticeable as a vocal leader.

Andersson was asked to do a lot for the Flames in 2024. As the final year of Andersson’s current deal approaches in the 2025-26 season, his emergence as an important player for the Flames on and off the ice probably can’t be understated.