Fantastic posts and both illustrate the points that Jiri had eluded to early in the thread that most fans here don’t ’not want to rebuild’ but are also realistic in their expectations and have also happily enjoyed the early success for the new, growing core. The vets will slowly but surely move on and with the way things are going the Flames will have an immense portion of their roster drafted and grown in house. Would it be nice to get that top 3 center?? Yes it absolutely would, but actively tanking the club with a pretty large youth movement growing within the organization is a recipe for an outcome for akin to Buffalo than the other resounding examples of landing a top prize pick (lol Toronto and Edmonton)
There is no perfect blueprint in this league otherwise everyone would dominate; the Flames are growing a culture that attributes winning as the highest goal and that’s the right mentality to be preaching with the amount of youth that is pushing into the lineup. The Flames are actually setup to have a step back year too in my eyes; with the intense start, more youth pushing and Wolf now having a book on him/potential sophomore slump as he continues to navigate the league the Flames could easily regress from the 96 points they impressively achieved last year. I’m extremely excited for the season though and accept either outcome of the finish good or bad because I trust now after 3 years of Conroy that this team has an overarching vision and goal that will give us some incredible hockey sooner than later.
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