New Flames GM has long believed in the benefits of adding young players and knows a method to achieve it
Of his beliefs for how to build a team, new Calgary Flames general manager Craig Conroy looks through his own history.
During his first two professional seasons while with the Montreal Canadiens organization, Conroy enjoyed brief stints with the big club. The six games he played over an 11-day stretch in the 1994-95 season and seven games over three weeks in 1995-96 did more than just give him a taste of NHL life. He was among a handful of young players rotated in and out of the lineup while they could be moved from the minor-league team to the NHL and back without having to go through waivers.
Conroy is a firm believer that experience not only helped the Canadiens gain a sense of what they had in those players, but also provided him and the others with a career boost gained from lessons learned.
On the day Conroy was named the eighth GM of the Flames, he provided some small but important insight to his plan to integrate more youth into Calgary’s lineup, and do not be surprised if he uses that aforementioned plan.
“I’m going to leave roster spots,” Conroy said. “I’m gonna give opportunity for those young players to play.”
He said as much to the club’s young prospects during the exit meetings for the AHL Calgary Wranglers.
“Come to training camp and earn a spot. Take a jersey. No one’s going to give you a jersey in this league, you have to take it — I truly believe it. I said you have to do the work, but there’s going to be a chance,” he added.
The lack of integrating young players into the lineup was definitely one of the myriad issues surrounding the Flames this past season. Conroy definitely wants to change that narrative.
(It’s worth noting that Conroy’s first game with Montreal in 1995-96 was the infamous 11-1 loss to the Detroit Red Wings in which Patrick Roy was left in the nets until he surrendered a ninth goal before being pulled and demanded a trade. Conroy was minus-4 and he’s joked with me, “Two were not my fault, the other two might have been.”)
Here are three other key takeaways from Conroy’s introduction as the GM on a day the club also added former Vancouver Canucks and Toronto Maple Leafs GM Dave Nonis as vice-president of hockey operations and assistant GM.
FINDING A NEW BENCH BOSS
Among the to-do list is putting in place a new head coach after Darryl Sutter was fired. There are all kinds of candidates, some within the organization (Kirk Muller, Ryan Huska, Mitch Love) and some outside with the likes of Travis Green (who has ties to Nonis) and Andrew Brunette among the names bandied about.
Noteworthy is how Conroy alluded to the lack of cohesion throughout the organization between Sutter and ... well, everybody.
“We need to work together. We need to be a team. We’re not head coach and management. We’re a team,” he said. “We’re in this together. We’re not going to be at odds. We’re not going to be lock-step all the time, but we’re going to have the same vision, passion for this team and the direction we’re going to go.”
THE FREE-AGENT ISSUE
The list of pending unrestricted free agents this summer looms nowhere near as large as the one for the summer of 2024. Forwards Elias Lindholm, Mikael Backlund, Tyler Toffoli and defensemen Noah Hanifin, Chris Tanev, Nikita Zadorov and Oliver Kylington are all due to become UFAs.
Conroy, who said Lindholm will be among the first people he calls to gauge his thoughts on remaining in Calgary, admitted watching Johnny Gaudreau leave last summer is not an experience he wants to replicate.
“I want to get where they’re at. Obviously, we can’t go into a season with seven UFAs. It just doesn’t make sense. We’re going to look at all those options.”
DOES JAROME IGINLA RETURN?
It won’t happen right away, but expect to have Flames all-time leading scorer Jarome Iginla back with the Flames organization at some point. Iginla and Conroy are best of friends and have talked for years about working together at the NHL level.
Iginla plans to spend next season coaching his son in Kelowna, and may become part of the Flames in a small capacity, but after that could very well become a bigger role.
“This is something I definitely want to explore,” Conroy admitted.