The Calgary Flames played a pretty good game of hockey on Monday night.
They played tight-checking hockey at five-on-five. They out-shot Winnipeg at even-strength 25-7 and held them to three high-danger scoring chances, according to Natural Stat Trick. Flames head coach Ryan Huska indicated post-game that
the team’s tracking had the Jets at six scoring chances.
But the Flames lost by a 2-1 score, with a parade of penalties and
their inability to bury oodles of scoring chances to blame for the decision. The NHL’s own tracking had the Flames hitting four posts.
Simply put: the Flames played a good game of hockey against a very good team – Winnipeg was the Presidents’ Trophy winner in 2024-25 – and just weren’t able to seal the deal offensively. To steal a phrase from Maxwell Smart from the classic TV series Get Smart: they missed it by
that much.
That’s been the name of the game for the Flames so far in 2025-26. Through seven games, they’ve put together two or three pretty strong showings but managed to fall short at key moments of the game, at either end of the ice, and find a way to lose. The irony is that their lone win, a shootout triumph on opening night in Edmonton, was a game where they really didn’t play all that well for at least half of the time.
Goaltender Dustin Wolf mentioned something after Monday’s loss when speaking with the media that stuck with me afterwards.
“We have to play a gritty game each and every night. We don’t have all the skill that a lot of these teams do. We have the grit and we have the grind and, you know, that’s the character and identity we have to play to. We can’t try to stray from it. If we do, we don’t have success.”
On one hand, the Flames have a pretty well-defined identity and know exactly how they need to play to have success. Over 82 games last season, they probably stuck to that playbook for 65-70 of those games. Sometimes they lost, but that style of play gave them a chance because, quite simply, they don’t have the elite skill (yet) to get into track meets or try to out-score their mistakes.
On the other hand: when you know that the margins in your games are going to be razor-thin – that a defensive mistake or you whiffing on a good scoring chance could be the difference between winning and losing – it must be a mentally-taxing style of hockey to play. But with how the Flames are presently constructed, that’s how the team has to proceed.
The Flames will win again. Heck, if they keep playing like they did against the Jets they’ll probably win more often than not. Goals and wins don’t come easily for the Flames these days, but if they want to get back into the right side of the ledger and start climbing back up the standings, there are no shortcuts, magic bullets or quick fixes.
The only way out is through.
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