On Tuesday, the Calgary Flames will visit the Dallas Stars in the 77th game of their 2025-26 regular season – and the fourth game of their lengthy six game road trip.

Tuesday’s game kicks off the final stretch of the season: six games in 10 days, with three home, three away, and a away/home back-to-back set thrown in to keep things interesting.

With playoffs well out of reach, here’s what to expect over the last 10 days of the season.

It would be easy to throw up your hands and go, “Well, just put the Wranglers in!” That’s both not possible because of the NHL’s call-up rules down the stretch – teams are limited to five regular recalls overall and four players on their roster on regular recalls at a time – but it’s also not really the Flames’ style. Both management and the coaching staff want to get young faces into the mix, but they don’t want to throw them to the wolves.

So expect the approach we’ve seen since the trade deadline to continue in terms of lineup mix: you’ll see Aydar Suniev, and continue to see Matvei Gridin, Zayne Parekh and Hunter Brzustewicz, but they’ll continue to be insulated by veterans like Olli Maatta, Victor Olofsson and Ryan Strome.

In 20 games since the Olympic break, Dustin Wolf has made 12 starts and Devin Cooley has made eight.

In 15 games since the trade deadline, Wolf has made nine starts and Cooley has made six.

With six games left, including a back-to-back, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that the goalie rotation will continue and that we’ll see each guy three more times.

Under head coach Ryan Huska, there have been a few non-negotiables. One of them has been the pace the team has to play at. The other has been the team’s defensive structure. The Flames know what they are and they know what they aren’t. They are not the 1980s Flames that could run and gun with the best of them. Instead, they need to focus on playing with pace and structure and wearing the opposition down over the course of a game.

All due respect to the Flames’ current group, but the trade deadline period took a team that struggled to score and removed some bonafide offensive options in Nazem Kadri and MacKenzie Weegar. Even more than their prior composition, these Flames need to grind out goals and score by committee. That’s worked on occasion, and the team should be commended for it. They have not rolled over and crawled into a hole after the big trades were made.

But their remaining opponents include Dallas (playoff team), Colorado (playoff team), Seattle (six points out of a playoff spot), Utah (playoff team), Colorado again and Los Angeles (tied for the last playoff spot). There are no free spaces on this bingo card, and it could be tough sledding from here on out.