The Flames’ Long Road to Building Around Dustin Wolf
If you’re trying to figure out where the Calgary Flames are in their rebuild, it helps to think of it like building a piece of furniture. Right now, they’ve got the most important piece sitting in the middle of the workshop: the legs. That’s Dustin Wolf.
And Wolf is not just any legs. The fact is that he looks like the kind that can actually hold weight in a real playoff-calibre piece someday. The Flames finally have a young, high-end starting goalie who doesn’t just survive games; he changes them. That’s rare. That’s foundational. That’s your starting point.
With the Flames, there are the goalies and everyone else.
Devin Cooley is also a strong, young netminder. The problem is that, other than the goalies, everything else is still scattered across the floor. Calgary finished 29th overall, slid down to No. 6 in the draft, and now they’re staring at a long checklist of fixes before anyone should even whisper the word contender again. The good news is they’ve got tools. Lots of them.
You start with the veterans. Blake Coleman is still the kind of useful, do-everything piece every good team needs. Jonathan Huberdeau and Mikael Backlund can still eat minutes and steady things out, even if you probably don’t want them carrying the whole project anymore. These are your instruction manuals—they help, but they’re not the future furniture.
The Flames also have a few good young players in the mix.
Then you look at the young pieces scattered around the shop. Zayne Parekh is the shiny new wood everyone’s excited about—skating, offence, power-play upside, all of it. Hunter Brzustewicz is more of a steady support beam on the back end. Up front, you’ve got Matthew Coronato, who still looks like there’s a scorer in there waiting to fully pop; Connor Zary can move the puck through traffic, and Matvei Gridin already looks like he belongs more than a 20-year-old usually does.
So the pieces are there. They’re just not assembled yet. And that’s the real issue in Calgary: they don’t have enough top-end furniture parts. Wolf is the foundation, maybe Parekh becomes a corner post, but they’re still missing that premium, game-breaking forward who actually makes everything fit together. That’s why sliding to No. 6 in the draft hurts a little—they needed a shot at another cornerstone.
All this said, Flames fans shouldn't feel sorry for themselves. There is a lot more coming.
Still, the asset cupboard isn’t empty. Between their own pick, Vegas’ first, and a pile of second and third-rounders, they’ve got volume. And in a rebuild like this, volume only matters if you actually hit on something important.
So the question hanging over everything is simple: how many real, high-end pieces can they find? Because Wolf can hold up the structure. But eventually, somebody’s got to build the rest of the furniture around him.