Let's look at the 10 most important and impactful players on the Flames, and how they performed last season (in order of who I think is the most important):
Huberdeau: career worst season
Lindholm: slow start, some good periods, but overall, so so
Markstrom: terrible - career worst? (relative to expectations)
Kadri: good start, but disastrous overall, and beyond horrific down the stretch
Andersson: very good
Weegar: slow first half, ended strong
Backlund: really good
Toffoli: slow start, but ended up as a career year
Mangiapane: poor overall, sometimes very bad
Hanifin: meh
Can anyone look at that list and think they won't be better this year?
Then you look at the changes: Lucic, Lewis, Ritchie, Stone out; Pelletier, Coronato, Duehr, Wolf in
Pretty easy to imagine they'll be better this year, IMO
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