COULD THE CALGARY FLAMES FINISH IN LAST PLACE IN THE 2024-25 NHL SEASON?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed the many changes the Calgary Flames have made to their hockey club over the last 12-24 months. Long story short, the team’s going in a different direction, aiming to regroup for a few seasons, get younger, and then make a push for post-season glory once again.
Over at Daily Faceoff, our pal Mike Gould profiled five teams that are contenders to finish at the bottom of the NHL’s standings in 2024-25. Among them were the Calgary Flames – along with San Jose, Chicago, Columbus and Seattle.
The case for last place
Before we delve into why the Flames were lumped into Gould’s potential bottom five teams, let’s get one thing out of the way: we’re not litigating whether or not the Flames should try to finish 32nd. There’s an obvious benefit to finishing dead-last, chief among them being the best lottery odds in the next NHL Draft. If you’re real bad, you have a better chance at selecting a franchise-changing player – which is how the draft’s inverse-standings scheme is meant to work and why “tanking” is a thing in the NHL.
In 2023-24, the Flames finished with a .494 points percentage over their 82 game schedule, good for ninth-worst in the NHL. Now, the Flames underwent some big changes during the season, trading away Nikita Zadorov, Elias Lindholm, Chris Tanev and Noah Hanifin in-season. Following the trade deadline, the Flames went 7-13-0 over their final 20 games, good for a .350 points percentage. They were tied for fourth-worst by that metric in the NHL after the trade deadline, with only San Jose, Anaheim and Columbus earning fewer points per game.
If you’re looking at the Flames’ performance down the stretch and then remove Andrew Mangiapane and Jacob Markstrom, then it’s reasonable to suspect they could be a bit worse down the stretch. There are enough question marks on the Flames’ roster that it’s not unfathomable that they should be near the bottom of the standings.
The case against last place
The 2023-24 Flames were a weird team. They looked good on paper, but the looming spectre of having so many pending unrestricted free agents cast a bit of a pall on the season. And then they started out 2-7-1. And then they started moving out players and the direction of the team became clear.
If we’re being honest, it’s a minor miracle that they hung around in the playoff picture as long as they did, a bit of a testament to how well the coaching staff and the team’s leadership group held things together. On a certain level, it felt like they were white-knuckling it to get through the season in one piece.
Well, good news, they won’t have to white-knuckle it in 2024-25. Aside from perhaps a pending UFA or two being sent elsewhere prior to March’s trade deadline, the Flames in Game 82 will likely resemble the Flames in Game 1. The direction is clear and now it’s a matter of figuring out which players from the roster they’ll be building around by the time the team emerges from the wilderness and (hopefully) returns to the post-season in a few seasons.
Let’s put it another way: a team with a laundry list of perpetual external distractions managed to hang around the playoffs despite some of their best players departing in-season. The remaining group are largely players that are young and hungry, have designs on being around long-term, are savvy veterans that understand their role on a growing team, or combinations thereof. In a way, they kind of remind me of the 2014-15 Flames: a team that spent their off-season hearing about how bad they were going to be, and then who came into training camp with a chip on their collective shoulders to prove the hockey establishment wrong.
In the 51-season history of the Flames franchise, their worst season by points percentage was .409 in 1997-98. The lowest they’ve landed in the NHL’s overall standings has been fourth-last, in 2013-14. We don’t doubt that this will likely be a challenging season in the standings for the red team. A long, long list of things would need to go extremely well for them to finish anywhere close to the post-season cutline. But a long, long list of things would need to go poorly for them to slide past the teams who have much more experience being downright bad than they do. (We’re not convinced they’ll be the worst team in their own division.)
The Flames will finish low in the 2024-25 standings. We’re not entirely sure they’ll finish last, though.
Where do you see the Flames finishing in the 2024-25 standings? Do you think they’re capable of finishing last, or do you think they’ll avoid that indignity?
Want more articles like this? Follow Flamesnation on MSN to see more of our exclusive NHL content.
More must-reads:
2024-08-29T18:21:24Z dg43tfdfdgfd