Flames fall to Mammoth to run losing streak to four games

Sometimes all it takes for a bad period to throw a hockey club out of whack and lead to a loss.

For the Calgary Flames, it was a rough second period that led to a 3-1 loss to the Utah Mammoth on Wednesday night at the Delta Center, dropping the Flames to 1-4-0 to start their 2025-26 season.

Leading 1-0 after the first period, the Flames were scored on by Utah’s Barrett Hayton just 1:16 into the second to tie the game. At 4:24, J.J. Peterka intercepted a pass and beat Devin Cooley on a breakaway to give the Mammoth a 2-1 lead.

From there, the Flames started to get into penalty trouble:

• MacKenzie Weegar was called for interference at 6:50.
• Blake Coleman was called for hooking at 9:32.
• Brayden Pachal was called for tripping at 13:42.

When you factor in two pairs of roughing minors that took Joel Farabee and Kevin Bahl out of play at 8:10, and a fighting major to Adam Klapka at 11:38, that’s a lot of time spent on special teams and a lot of time spent with only a handful of Flames players really involved in the game.

Speaking to Flames TV following the game, head coach Ryan Huska discussed the second period and how the game got away from them.

“Well, one, they stretched us out a little bit, and then I think the speed through the neutral zone hemmed us into our own zone a few times,” said Huska. “And then the penalties that we took, once we were killing that many penalties, I don’t think we got out of our zone in the period. And then you’re making fatigue mistakes more than anything. Third period, I thought we regrouped, and our forwards did a better job of trying to take the game to them a little bit more. And we had some chances at the end, but were not able to finish.”

Playing their second game of a back-to-back, with travel, the Flames had just six skaters play more than six minutes in the second period: Rasmus Andersson (9:02), Bahl (8:29), Mikael Backlund (8:11), Weegar (7:11), Coleman (6:39) and Joel Hanley (6:09). Considering the circumstances, that’s a lot of high-leverage time for a handful of key players that already played a lot against Vegas, and it left a few key Flames on the bench for most of the second period. (Matt Coronato played just 3:20, Morgan Frost just 2:45.)

The loss runs the Flames current slide to four games after an opening night comeback win against Edmonton. Through 305 minutes of play over five games, the Flames have led for just 67 minutes, and they’ve been out-scored 10-1 in third periods. After some challenging early outings, the team will attempt to regroup.

“That is important for the guys to recognize that the work is there, right?” said Huska, speaking about the team’s struggles to star the season. “It’s some of the execution that’s not or a mistake at the inopportune time that’s costing us in some of these games, that stuff has to be cleaned up. So I do feel a little bit that we’ve beaten ourselves in this stretch right now and those are all things that I think are correctable for sure. But having said that, you need to fix your game in a hurry, because you can’t make the playoffs in the first month of the year but you surely can miss them.”

The Flames are back in action on Saturday night when they visit the Vegas Golden Knights.