What went wrong with the Wranglers last season?

As we’re in the dog days of summer and most of the business around sorting out the NHL and AHL rosters has died down for now, I wanted to take a little time to reflect on the Calgary Wranglers’ 2025-26 season as a whole. The hockey withdrawals hit and continued access on FloHockey have me re-watching some games and thinking, were the issues of the year present all season? Or did it spiral over time? From my observations, it’s the latter. 

Offence

Some individuals carried the offence on a regular basis, but many nights it wasn’t enough. Dryden Hunt had a career year in point production, Martin Frk hit 30 goals and Rory Kerins put up just over a point per game even with about a month of missed time due to injury. Others took a step back and were struggling to produce. 

When the top two lines weren’t able to pull ahead or control a game, they weren’t getting much help from the third and fourth lines. Aydar Suniev started slow but took off in the second half of the season. Matvei Gridin was a big help while he was there, but wasn’t a permanent solution. Only Kerins and Frk broke over 20 goals last season and Daniil Miromanov and Nick Cicek were really the only two defencemen putting up goals from the blue line semi-regularly over the year. 

Defence

The Wranglers started the season losing long-time AHLer Ilya Solovyov to waivers. That gave more opportunity to Yan Kuznetsov and Hunter Brzustewicz. Kuznetsov’s stint in the AHL was very brief before he was called up and established himself as a part of the defensive core for the Flames. Brzustewicz was not super far behind and earned opportunities to battle Brayden Pachal for depth time in the NHL. So by the time you’re in month two of the AHL season, you’re down three core defenders, leaving rookies and newcomers to man the blue line. 

They did put the work in but you could tell that edge was missing. Many more shots were making it to the goaltenders and the opposition was finding more space to make high danger plays. The Wranglers ended up giving up the most goals in the league over the course of the regular season with 269. Any team over 240 did not qualify for the playoffs. 

Goaltending

The elephant in the room was Ivan Prosvetov came back to North America expecting to compete for an NHL spot. Dustin Wolf was established as the starter and back up role was up for grabs. When Devin Cooley outplayed him in pre-season, Prosvetov seemed to miss his window. That undoubtedly affected his confidence and performance as his season went on in the AHL. Not to mention a longer term injury that allowed others such as Owen Say and Arsenii Sergeev to thrive. Because they weren’t starting the season looking for NHL time (though they both got it indirectly and directly), they were looking to play as much as possible and develop along the way. 

Statistically speaking, the Wranglers did not have a single goaltender on their team that ranked in the top-20 in the AHL in any of the major goaltending categories as rookies or overall. This included categories such as GAA, save percentage, and wins.

Special teams

The Wranglers’ penalty kill was the lowest ranked in the league with a 75.8% as they gave up 64 power play goals over the season. This crept up on nearly a power play goal against per game. In those scenarios where goaltending and/or defence is struggling, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that they’d struggle on the penalty kill as well.

The power play was not exceptional either but not at the bottom of the league. They were 28th in the league with a 15.1% power play success rate and 35 power play goals over the whole season. Aydar Suniev led the way in power play goals with seven and Justin Kirkland and Martin Frk were right behind him with six each. 

Overtime and shootouts

The Wranglers nearly broke an AHL record last season for the number of games they took out of regulation with 24. The current record is 29. Of those games, nine resulted in a win, leaving an extra 15 points on the table. Even if by some miracle they won all their overtime and shootout games though, that still wouldn’t have guaranteed a playoff spot. They needed more results than that. 

Closing thoughts

It really wasn’t just one person or one aspect of the Wranglers game that failed them last season. It was a combination of everything struggling to click and when one thing was on such as goal scoring, goaltending was failing and vice versa. This team started with hope and high level play and if you had to pinpoint the beginning of the downfall, I’d put that around mid-November. They held it together as well as they could until the end of 2025 but their lowest point of the season hit around mid-January.

I don’t want to continue to beat a dead horse (sorry Blasty), so as we move forward into the Fall, the door is closed on last season as we anticipate this season. Most of that roster has signed elsewhere and it will be a very new group going into the fall with a fresh perspective mostly unaffected by the drawbacks of the 2025-26 season. The 2026-27 season for the Wranglers has all the room to go up and establish themselves as a contender in the Pacific Division.