Friends, it’s that time of year again. It’s time for FlamesNation’s annual Calgary Flames summer prospect rankings!

Every year, we make a list of every player on the Flames’ reserve list that’s eligible for the Calder Trophy, and then we submit our top 20 rankings from that longer list. This year, there were 39 prospects eligible for this process.

27 different players appeared on at least one top 20 ballot. In the interest of showcasing the sheer depth in the system, here are six of the 12 Flames prospects that we couldn’t fit on our ballots this year.

Parker Bell

A fifth-round pick in 2022, Bell spent the 2023-24 season as an overager with the Western League’s Tri-City Americans and became a full-time pro in 2024-25. He spent the entire season with the Calgary Wranglers and ended up playing in 61 games as a rookie. Bell spent most of his time as a bottom-six winger, but his checking details became gradually more refined as the season wore on and he used his 6’5″, 209 pound frame pretty effectively. We’ll see how he keeps growing as an AHL sophomore.

Daniil Chechelev

If you want an example of how unfair Russian hockey can be, here’s Chechelev. A fourth-round pick in 2020, he moved to North America from Russia in 2021 and spent two seasons split between the Flames’ AHL and ECHL affiliates on a pair of one year AHL deals. He was rock-solid in the chaotic defensive environment of the ECHL, but couldn’t get a foothold in the AHL – the Heat and Wranglers had Dustin Wolf and some veteran backups that were tough to supplant. Returning to Russia in 2023 looking for another opportunity, he hasn’t really found a home… and just when it seemed like he found a nice spot with Yunison-Moskva in the second-tier VHL pro league, his team withdrew from competition for the 2025-26 season. Even if he’s not really a prospect of note anymore, here’s hoping Chechelev gets a chance somewhere this season.

Nick Cicek

A Western League product who spent parts of four seasons with the Portland Winterhawks, and captained them in 2020-21, Cicek joined the Flames as a free agent signing in July. He spent three seasons in San Jose’s system (and was briefly with Vancouver’s AHL club), and established himself as a really reliable two-way defender. He spent last season in Germany with Adler Mannheim and performed well, and at the very least, he’s a 6’3″, 200-pound blueliner that can provide effective depth for the Wranglers. But considering he’s only 25, we’re not sure if he’s hit his ceiling quite yet.

Lucas Ciona

Every year, there’s a player that doesn’t crack our rankings’ top-20 and makes us look utterly foolish. One prominent candidate for that role this year could be Ciona, a sixth-round pick back in 2021. The captain of the WHL champion Seattle Thunderbirds in 2023, Ciona had an uneven first pro season in 2023-24. But he seemed to really find an identity to his game and some consistency in his role as an agitating checker, and he was quietly one of the Wranglers’ more effective role players.

Artem Grushnikov

Acquired from Dallas in the Chris Tanev trade, Grushnikov has a lot of the tools to be a rock-solid shutdown defender. The challenge for him is that he just hasn’t found his consistency or rhythm with the Wranglers yet. He spent most of the season on the de facto third pair, playing with Jeremie Poirier. Grushnikov is still quite young and he’s obviously trying to learn and improve, but he just needs to work on consistency most of all to keep progressing.

Axel Hurtig

A 2023 seventh-round pick, Hurtig is a big-bodied Swedish blueliner. He made a big change in 2024-25, coming over to join the Calgary Hitmen in the Western League after being selected in the 2023 CHL Import Draft and spending the 2023-24 season in Sweden. After a brief period of adjustment, he quietly became one of the better shutdown defenders in the entire WHL and even played at the World Juniors for Sweden. He was among the WHL’s defensive league leaders in plus/minus, and he was a really stabilizing presence on the Hitmen’s back end. We’ll see if he can build on that in 2025-26.