The recent demotion of 2020 first-round pick Connor Zary reveals another significant weakness in the organization’s foundation

The necessity of a rebuild in Calgary can be traced back to the summer of 2022, when Johnny Gaudreau left as a free agent, and Matthew Tkachuk requested a trade.

The degradation of the club’s fortunes seems entirely downstream of those two momentous decisions.

From the desperate acquisitions that summer of Jonathan Huberdeau and Nazem Kadri, and the domino effect that followed.

But the recent demotion of 2020 first-round pick Connor Zary reveals another significant weakness in the organization’s foundation. One that will result in a deeper, longer rebuild cycle.

It was the hollowing out of Calgary’s prospect pipeline executed under former GM Brad Treliving. From 2017 until his final draft in 2022, the Flames prospect cupboard was made threadbare through a combination of futures trades, bad picks, and bad luck.

The Flames made 34 picks over those six drafts, with just four of them occurring in the first round. Of those picks (Jusso Valimaki, Jakob Pelletier, Zary, and Matthew Coronato), only one is currently skating on the Flames roster today (or in the NHL in general).

Some of these drafts, like 2022, were wiped out by trades. The Flames only had three picks that year in the second, fifth, and seventh rounds. The 2021 draft was undermined by the COVID era, where scouting was difficult, and a lot of prospects had truncated seasons. Calgary found Coronato at 13th overall and struck out with the rest of their picks that year.

The ‘17, ‘18, and ‘19 drafts saw the Flames pick just five times in each. Valimaki, taken 16th overall in 2017, saw his development and lackluster skating hobbled by knee injuries (somewhat like Zary). He never really recovered. Pelletier topped out as a very good AHLer, and Ryan Popisil (Calgary’s first choice at 105 in 2018) is a fine bottom-of-the-rotation find for so late in the draft.

That’s why Calgary only has four holdovers from that entire draft cohort: Coronato, Dustin Wolf, Yan Kuznetsov, and Popisil. As mentioned, Popisil is a depth player at this point, and Kuznetsov is on track to be a decent, everyday NHLer. Only Wolf and Coronato may figure prominently in the Flames’ next competitive window.

The organization pulled some decent value picks from the depths of the draft, but having only one good skater from seven straight drafts is going to make Conroy’s job more difficult.

Because now the Flames GM isn’t only tasked with finding new cornerstone talents to replace the Gaudreau’s and Tkachuk’s of the world. He also has to backfill nearly an entire decade’s worth of homegrown talent and support players.

It’s why the club has spent some of its recent trade and draft capital adding guys in the prime-aged cohort. Kevin Bahl, Yegor Sharangovich, Morgan Frost, and Joel Farabee are helping to plug a major gap in the current line-up.

Connor Zary being sent down to the AHL means the club’s pre-Conroy draft efforts are almost a complete write-off. So little prime-aged talent makes connecting the next wave of kids to an existing competitive thread within the organization a difficult task.

A quicker turnaround may have been possible with a handful of stars entering their prime (like Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki in Montreal), but that’s not in the Flames’ fortunes. Farabee and company are fine middle rotation players, but they are, to a man, “build with” not “build around” guys.

The entirety of the next core will have to come from Conroy’s draft and trade efforts. And much of the supporting cast too. The teardown wasn’t just a response to the club’s need for more elite talent (though that is still a primary concern), but also because the foundation was wobbly and likely to collapse anyways.

Calgary’s will be a more protracted rebuild in response. This isn’t Conroy’s mess, but he’s stuck cleaning it up. A bottoming-out was inevitable, but hopefully it can be leveraged to create a contender. Even if though it won’t happen any time soon.