This coming season, Stanley Cup champion Ryan Lomberg will be returning to the club where he made his National Hockey League debut: the Calgary Flames.

As he begins his second stint with the club, Lomberg joins an eclectic group of players who have had two runs wearing the Flaming C. Today, we’ll delve into the history of one of them: forward Carey Wilson.

A Winnipeg product, Wilson was drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks in 1980 but had a tremendously odd path to professional hockey. He played a season with the AJHL’s Calgary Chinooks (and briefly played for the WHL’s Wranglers), then he played two seasons with Dartmouth College in the NCAA, then he played for HIFK in the Finnish Liiga, the Canadian national junior team and the Canadian national team before going pro.

Wilson couldn’t come to terms with Chicago on a contract, so he was traded by the Blackhawks to the Flames in 1982 (while he was playing in Europe) in exchange for Denis Cyr, the Flames’ first-round pick from the 1980 draft. Wilson began with the Flames at the tail-end of the 1983-84 season, joining following the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.

A right-shot centre with some size, Wilson had 72 points in 74 games in his first full pro season (1984-85) and finished fifth in Calder balloting. While he never quite maintained that level of production with the club during the rest of his first tenure, he was a pretty productive offensive player, finding a great bit of chemistry with Richard Kromm and Colin Patterson on what then-Calgary Herald scribe Eric Duhatschek dubbed the “Dice Line.” (The name was a sly reference to the jersey numbers of the trio: Patterson wore 11, Kromm wore 22 and Wilson wore 33.)

But his time with the Flames ended in 1988, as general manager Cliff Fletcher continued to tweak his team as he chased a Stanley Cup.

Midway through the 1987-88 season, the Flames traded Wilson, Neil Sheehy and prospect Lane MacDonald to the Hartford Whalers in exchange for Shane Churla and Dana Murzyn. Churla was subsequently traded to Minnesota at the 1989 trade deadline in a trade for Brian MacLellan, and both he and Murzyn were parts of the Flames’ 1989 Cup win.

Wilson, meanwhile, had a season and a half of awesome hockey upon leaving Calgary. In the back-half of 1987-88 with Hartford he scored 38 points in 36 games. He split 1988-89 between the Whalers and the New York Rangers and posted 77 points in 75 games. However, injuries began to catch up to him and slow down his production; he was limited to just 41 games in 1989-90 and his production on a per-game basis was basically cut in half.

He returned to the Whalers for the 1990-91 season, but soon found himself in another familiar spot.

Prior to the 1991 trade deadline, Fletcher re-acquired Wilson from Hartford. The trade was one-for-one, with Mark Hunter headed to New England.

Wilson played the remainder of 1990-91 with the Flames, as well as the 1991-92 and 1992-93 campaigns. But Wilson was limited to just 76 games during this run, primarily due to a knee injury that seemed to keep getting worse.

The last game that Wilson played in the NHL was on Dec. 4, 1992 against the St. Louis Blues. He was out the rest of the season with a torn knee tendon that required surgery. His deal expired at the end of that season and he retired, opting to return to Dartmouth College to finish his degree at that point. (He made a brief comeback in 1996-97, playing seven AHL games for the Manitoba Moose.)

Wilson’s son, Colin, ended up following his father’s footsteps into the NHL, playing over 600 games split between Nashville and Colorado.