The Flames played a home game in Phoenix in 1994

Since entering the National Hockey League as an expansion team back in 1972, the Calgary Flames have played a lot of hockey in their two home cities.

Since their inception in 1972, they’ve played 2,057 regular season home games. 308 were in Atlanta, all at the Omni. 1,736 have been in Calgary: 120 at the Stampede Corral, 1,615 at the Saddledome and one at McMahon Stadium.

That leaves three home games that were played at neutral sites.

These are their stories.

Did you know that the Flames played a home game in Phoenix, Arizona’s America West Arena on Jan. 24, 1994?

The background

Let’s flash back to 1993.

Coming out of the 1992 player’s strike, the regular season was expanded from 80 to 84 games starting with the 1992-93 season, with each team playing two neutral site games in locations selected to test out which markets could be good candidates for NHL expansion.

In 1992-93, the Flames played a road game in Saskatoon and a home game in Cincinnati. Meanwhile, arguably the best-received neutral site game was a clash between Montreal and Los Angeles held in Phoenix. In the 1993-94 season, the Flames were scheduled to return to Saskatoon (for another road game) and head to Phoenix for a home game, one of four games to be hosted at America West Arena that season. (The 1992-93 game in Cincinnati was a bit of a mess, and that city never hosted another NHL game during the league’s neutral-site experiments.)

The game

The Flames headed into the game missing six regulars due to injury, including starting netminder Mike Vernon. As a result, their goaltending tandem was Andrei Trefilov, backed up by Trevor Kidd.

After a scoreless first period, the teams basically exchanged goals for the rest of the night.

The Kings headed into the third period with a 2-1 lead off of power play goals in the second period from Luc Robitaille and Wayne Gretzky. Ron Stern had the lone Flames goals.

Theo Fleury tied the game early in the third period with a shorthanded goal, and the Flames took a lead later in the period off a goal from Robert Reichel. But the Kings scored their third power play goal of the game with 3.5 seconds left in regulation, with Chris Dahlquist in the sin bin and Kelly Hrudey on the bench for the extra attacker.

Overtime solved nothing, and the game finished as a tie. Oddly enough, it was the second consecutive tie for the Flames in a neutral site home game.

The aftermath

The 1993-94 season was the final year of the NHL’s neutral site experiment. The NHL released an 84-game schedule for the 1994-95 season, which featured the Flames playing a pair of neutral site games in Phoenix, but that became a moot point when the owners locked the players out at the beginning of October and the schedule was scrapped.

The 1994-95 season eventually went forward after a new CBA was agreed to in January 1995, but only with 48 games and with no neutral site games. Subsequent seasons were reduced to 82 games and the neutral site experiment was abandoned.