2. Young, talented players on back end<\/p>\n
The Flames, who have missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs in each of the past four seasons, are rebuilding around their talented players on the back end, from defensemen Simon Nemec<\/a> (No. 2 pick in 2022 NHL Draft; acquired from New Jersey Devils this offseason) and Zayne Parekh<\/a> (No. 9 pick in 2024 NHL Draft) to starting goalie Dustin Wolf<\/a> (second in\u00a0Calder Trophy voting in 2024-25 behind winner Lane\u00a0Hutson<\/a>) and backup options\u00a0Devin Cooley<\/a> and Arsenii Sergeev<\/a>.<\/p>\n Wolf, 25, was tied for 10th in the NHL in both quality starts (27) and long-range save percentage (.979). Cooley, 29, was quietly tied for second in the NHL in high-danger save percentage (.850 in 31 games) last season behind only New York Islanders goalie\u00a0Ilya\u00a0Sorokin<\/a> (.864 in 55 games). Sergeev, 23, stopped 27 of 28 shots faced, including nine of 10 high-danger shots faced, to win his NHL debut against the Los Angeles Kings on April 16.<\/p>\n Nemec, 22, ranked among the defenseman leaders in both high-danger goals (three; 92nd percentile) and midrange goals (six; 94th percentile) last season. Parekh, 20, ranked in the 94th percentile in offensive zone time percentage (45.5 in 37 games) last season and has the ceiling of leading the Flames in points in his first full NHL season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2. Young, talented players on back end The Flames, who have missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs in each…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-842990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}