FN’s mid-season Flames prospect updates: Mace’o Phillips

The Calgary Flames went into the 2025 NHL Draft with a pretty clear aim.

Entering the festivities low on centres as an organization, they selected Victoria Royals centre Cole Reschny at 18th overall. Awhile later, they selected Arizona State freshman Cullen Potter at 32nd overall. A little later, they selected Swedish pivot Theo Stockselius at 54th overall.

With their fourth pick, in the third round, 80th overall, they opted to go in a different direction: big-bodied, left shot defenceman Mace’o Phillips.

After two seasons with the prestigious U.S. National Development Program, the 6’6″, 230-pound Phillips joined the United States Hockey League’s Green Bay Gamblers for the 2025-26 season.

A physical, shutdown defender, Phillips was the two-way conscience for a lot of the USNDP’s puck-moving defenders during his 16 and 17-year-old seasons. In the portions of the USNDP’s seasons spent playing against USHL teams, he had four points in 2023-24 (0.121 per game) and three points in 2024-25 (0.120 per game). Heading to Green Bay, it was pretty clear not to expect Phillips to suddenly become Zayne Parekh. But considering he had been a tough-minutes defensive presence for the United States at the 2023 Under-17 Hockey Challenge (capturing silver) and the 2025 Under-18 World Championship (capturing bronze), a high standard of play was a reasonable expectation.

A good chunk of the way through his gap year before heading to college, Phillips is largely performing as you would expect. Offensively, he’s not going to be confused for any of the Flames’ offensive-minded young defenders, but he’s posted seven points through 28 games, doubling last season’s points-per-game output to 0.250. He still has a ways to go, but that’s a really solid step forward offensively.

He has remained a pretty boisterous physical presence, though. He loves to throw punishing hits and to scrap and, as a result, he led the USDNP’s Under-17 Team in penalty minutes in 2023-24 and their Under-18 Team in 2024-25. He currently leads Green Bay by penalty minutes by a big margin and is fourth in the entire USHL in time spent in the sin bin. (He’s also been suspended twice for a total of four games for a couple fighting incidents.) It’s worth noting that the types of penalties he gets aren’t your usual laziness or obstruction penalties, but skew heavily towards aggression – he has four minutes in tripping minors, with the other 118 PIMs coming via roughing, fighting, interference, cross-checking, elbowing and various related misconducts.

Phillips is slated to join the University of Minnesota for the 2026-27 season, where he’ll play his freshman year as a 19-year-old. He has the benefit of being, to be blunt, a gigantic young man. He has the size and he’s shown the ability to play alongside high-end talents on his team and shut down high-end talents on the opposition. If he can continue building his offensive game, and find a way to stay out of the penalty box a bit more while maintaining his physicality, there’s a good amount of upside there.

He’s admittedly a bit of a project and he may take awhile to fulfill his potential, but you can easily see glimpses of the type of player the Flames hope Phillips can become if things work out.