Some familiar foes have begun to lap the Flames

The once frequent playoff battles between the Calgary Flames and their ’90s era expansion rivals have long ground to a halt.

The San Jose Sharks and Anaheim Ducks — who entered the league in 1991 and 1993, respectively — have served as both a thorn in Calgary’s side and a stepping stone to greater heights since their introduction into the NHL’s Pacific Division. In recent years, however, their post-season duels have been nonexistent, with both the Sharks and Ducks embarking on a rebuilding process almost simultaneously in the late 2010s.

Those roster overhauls came after a long period of success for both California-based organizations. Anaheim missed the playoffs just three times from 2003 to 2018, a run that included five trips to the conference finals and a Stanley Cup championship in ‘07. For San Jose, they punched a post-season ticket in all but two years from 1998 to 2019, and made it past the first round 17 of 21 times in that span.

Calgary met each of them in the playoffs three times, winning one, their conference finals match-up with the Sharks in 2004, which propelled them to the Stanley Cup Final.

Needless to say, the Flames have been less fortunate. The ‘04 run — which came after seven straight playoff misses — was followed by round two exits in each of the next four seasons, and just two appearances in the second round since then.

The fall of the Ducks and Sharks coincided with the rise of a promising Flames core that included emerging stars in Matthew Tkachuk, Johnny Gaudreau, Elias Lindholm, and Sean Monahan.

What had the makings of a prosperous period of Flames hockey ended in heartbreak and mass exodus a few years later.

Now in the mid-2020s, Calgary continues to pick up the pieces from a disastrous 2022 off-season, highlighted by the departure of its top two forwards, Tkachuk and Gaudreau. Meanwhile, their Californian counterparts have slowly shrunk the gap in on-ice product by means of a staggering youth infusion through the draft, and now appear to have overtaken the ailing Flames once again, who currently dwell at the bottom of not only the Pacific Division, but league-wide standings as well.

Conversely, San Jose (8-7-3) and Anaheim (11-5-1) have both had promising starts to the season, and feature two of the most exciting young nuclei of players in the league, headlined by top-four NHL scorers Macklin Celebrini and Leo Carlsson.

It’s a stark reality for the Flames, who have accumulated nowhere near the amount of promising young players as the Sharks or Ducks over the last six seasons, and have just one more series victory to show for it.

The result? A vastly different makeup in terms of both age and production amongst the team’s best players. Calgary’s top three scorers, Nazem Kadri, Jonathan Huberdeau, and Mikael Backlund, have combined for 28 points this season, and sport an average age of 34 years old. While Anaheim’s trio of Leo Carlsson, Cutter Gauthier, and Troy Terry have accumulated 67 points at an average age of 22.7, and San Jose’s Macklin Celebrini, Will Smith, and William Eklund, sit at 54 combined points and average 20.3 years of age.

The Flames’ top players are on the 18th hole of their hockey careers and have already begun to regress. On the other hand, many of the top contributors down south are too young to buy a drink at a bar, yet are far more productive on the ice.

The chasm between them is an indication that the Flames have a long, long road ahead.