It’s easy for fans (and yours truly) to forget it, but prospect development is never completely linear. Not for blue-chippers, not for seventh-round picks, not for anyone.

The Calgary Flames are entering a period where they need to be more cautious with their top prospects than ever before. With all their existing prospects and upcoming draft picks, their development staff will have to be at the top of its game. They have lots and lots of work to do.

Particularly since the calendar flipped to 2024, the Flames have publicly embraced player development as their top priority, trading more than a half-dozen established veterans for lottery tickets and slowly integrating younger players into their NHL lineup. The early results have been very promising, with multiple prospects taking big steps forward.

Here are three players who have helped write some of the biggest developmental success stories for the Flames in 2024.

Reasonable people can disagree over whether Coronato really still qualifies as a prospect. Sure, he’s already played in 24 NHL games this season, but he only just turned 22, he was in the AHL not too long ago, and his game is still very much a work in progress.

All that said, Coronato has already gone from being a marginal presence in his first few call-ups with the Flames this calendar year to emerging as one of the team’s best offensive forwards over the past few weeks. In his previous stints with the club, Coronato often looked tentative, physically outmatched, and a step or two behind the play. Now, he’s forced his way into this team’s top nine with his newfound assertiveness, quickness, and his natural ability to find goal-scoring areas — all traits he routinely demonstrated during his tenures with the Chicago Steel, Harvard Crimson, and Calgary Wranglers. It’s been fantastic to watch.

The Flames may not have their top-six centres of the future lined up just yet, but Coronato has all the necessary attributes to become a quality scoring winger at the top of this team’s roster. He’s always shown flashes. Now, he looks like he might just be the real deal.

Mike Cammalleri has always been Coronato’s most natural comparable, and he’s looking more and more like him with each passing game, but even if he ends up as more of an Andrew Mangiapane-type player, the Flames will be more than happy. Much as they did with Mangiapane, the Flames have been using Coronato in more of a 200′ role right from the outset. Calgary badly needs a player with Coronato’s scoring ability who can also make an impact in his own end. So far, all signs have been positive.

The Flames opted not to play Kerins in a single pre-season game this past September. He spent most of training camp as a member of Group C, skating with juniors and players on AHL contracts. And now, he’s the American Hockey League’s second-leading goal-scorer.

It’s been a startling turn of events for the 22-year-old, who has always been a bit of an odd duck in the Flames’ system. This is a player who was rewarded for his outstanding 19-year-old season with the Soo Greyhounds by being banished to the ECHL’s Rapid City Rush for his first pro campaign. Sure, the Wranglers didn’t have much room for him, but prospects of any repute almost never spend time in Rapid City, and it’s vanishingly rare for anyone to make it to the NHL after playing a full season in the ECHL. Just ask Ilya Nikolaev.

Nevertheless, Kerins finally cemented himself as an AHLer in the 2023-24 campaign, collecting 16 goals and 32 points in 54 games. But he never quite found consistency in his first year under head coach Trent Cull, cooling off in a big way after a solid start and being made a healthy scratch on a regular basis throughout the year. Despite finishing third on the team in goals, Kerins only appeared in one of the Wranglers’ six playoff contests.

Now, Kerins is the Wranglers’ No. 1 centre and leading scorer. Even without Jakob Pelletier on his line, he’s just kept chugging away. He has 17 goals in 24 games this year while playing a pivotal role on the team’s No. 1 power-play unit. Sure, he’s shooting 28.3 percent, but he’s also due to start picking up a few more assists (he only has 10). And about that whole consistency thing? Kerins has more multi-point games (seven) than he does zero-point games (six). He’s been a metronome. Don’t be surprised if the Flames reward him with a call-up at some point after New Years’ Day.

With Pelletier back in the NHL, the Wranglers have had a need for someone like Stromgren to step into his role and produce. Wouldn’t you know it: Stromgren now has points in each of his last six games and goals in four straight, catapulting him up near the top of the team’s scoring leaderboard with 19 points in 24 games.

The past 12 months have been a whirlwind for Stromgren, who struggled to score at any level while playing in his native Sweden during his first two seasons as a Flames prospect. That didn’t prevent the team from signing him to an entry-level contract in 2023, but he followed that up by scoring just one goal in his first 44 games in North America with the Wranglers. He didn’t record his second goal of the 2023-24 campaign until February 17 of this year.

But Stromgren sure picked it up from there, finishing the season with 22 points in 42 games in 2024 after managing just three in 26 games in 2023. He was even better in the 2024 Calder Cup Playoffs, racking up four points and 12 shots on goal in six games. All things considered, not a bad end to the year for the rookie AHLer, particularly given how much stronger he looked with and without the puck compared to his relatively inconspicuous start.

These days, Stromgren has fully established himself as one of the Wranglers’ best players and is likely at the front of the line to join the Flames on a recall. He’s a master of puck possession, using his impressive frame to its full advantage to control the play in all corners of the ice, and the Wranglers routinely use him in all game situations. His raw production may not be as gaudy as what, say, Kerins and Pelletier have managed this year, but Stromgren plays a more projectable game than both. Given time, he could turn into a quality two-way middle-six winger at the NHL level.