1 year if the Flames draft extremely well, and load up on UFAs (hopefully not the case!)
2 years if the Flames draft very well, 'win' some trades and sign a key UFA
3 years if the Flames draft well, sign some key UFAs
4 years if the Flames draft badly and slightly mismanage the team
..
..
you can guess the rest. LoL
Key point in my mind is that the Flames do have young prospects emerging, they have youth (Backlund and Brodie) who are developing nicely, and they have vets that aren't too old (Glencross, Giordano, Hudler, etc).
They also have a fairly deep goalie prospect pool, which is very important. I don't anticipate that the Flames will take as long as Edmonton is taking (or be as 'bad' as they have been for this long), but if they screw up then of course it will be years...
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