Gang, when you look at the history of the Calgary Flames, generally-speaking there have been seasons where they have “it” and seasons where they do not.

Case in point? The Flames made the playoffs with a 53 point cushion in 1988-89, the season they won the Stanley Cup. That was one of 14 seasons where they had 20 or more points between them and the best non-playoff team. They’ve also experienced 11 seasons where they missed the playoffs by 10 or more points.

Well folks, in 2024-25, the Flames did not make the playoffs.

In the 20 prior seasons where they had failed to qualify for the playoffs, the average distance between the Flames and the last playoff spot was 9.6 points. The distance between them and the final spot in 2024-25 was zero points, with the Flames losing out on the regulation wins tiebreaker after finishing the 82 game regular season tied with St. Louis at 96 points. The Flames became part of a four-way tie with the 2014-15 Boston Bruins, 2017-18 Florida Panthers and 2018-19 Montreal Canadiens for the most points in NHL history by a team that missed the playoffs.

In the words of Get Smart‘s Maxwell Smart: missed it by that much.

The frustrating end to 2024-25 came on the heels of three really eventful seasons. The 2021-22 Flames had a tremendous regular season, winning the Pacific Division and ousting the Dallas Stars in seven crazy games before losing to the Edmonton Oilers in five games. That off-season saw the departures of Matthew Tkachuk and Johnny Gaudreau, and general manager Brad Treliving trying to keep the club’s contention window open by swapping in Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar and Nazem Kadri.

The 2023-23 season was chaos, with head coach Darryl Sutter clashing with several players, the newcomers not quite meshing with the existing systems, and the Flames missing the playoffs by just two points. Treliving and Sutter both departed that off-season, with Craig Conroy installed as general manager and Ryan Huska as head coach.

The 2023-24 season saw Conroy deal with the messy contractual situation he inherited from Treliving, with seven pending unrestricted free agents. Conroy ended up making several in-season trades to avoid losing those assets for nothing. The Flames hung around the playoff picture for much of the year, but a depleted group went into free-fall after the trade deadline and missed the playoffs by 17 points.

By contrast, 2024-25 was a quiet year, almost by design. Simply put: the group had dealt with three seasons of craziness and so Conroy seemed to use the year to evaluate the quality of the team he had left to him after all the changes.

Turns out they were pretty good. But just not quite good enough to find one more point in the standings: two regulation losses in St. Louis in January or a late-game collapse against Anaheim leading to an overtime loss in April were probably the difference.

A lot of things went right for the Flames in 2024-25, most notably the emergence of rookie goaltender Dustin Wolf as a bonafide star in the NHL. But it just wasn’t quite enough to get them into the post-season, and the Flames ended up missing by the smallest margin in franchise history (and one of the smallest in NHL history).