On the positive side, if the Flames re-sign Johnny and Tkachuk, and can promote some players from the farm to make up for some UFA losses, there is no reason to believe they could not repeat the same excellent regular season they just had.
That gets substantially the same team back to the playoffs one year wiser, and likely facing different opponents. There's no doubt the Flames didn't play to the peak of their abilities in the playoffs this year, so good reason to believe that the same roster could outperform this year's playoff performance. That might be good enough to get them to the conference finals, or even the finals, and who wouldn't like to see that?
So all is not lost going into next season, but just about everything for next year depends on whether Johnny is back. If he's not, it will likely be a ho hum season while we wait for some big contracts to come off the books and some prospects to develop.
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