Which way now?

"Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in."

Been a minute.

Apologies to everyone subscribed to this place. My year has been a tumultuous one. I’ll spare you the details, though you can read this if you’re curious.

Also - it didn’t seem to make sense to write much about the Flames this year. I’ve popped up on Post Media here and there with some spot checks, and the Barnburner boys let me drink beer on their podcast sometimes.

But this season was mostly about letting the year play out and assessing the progress.

It’s starting to get interesting again now that Calagry has somehow eased back into the friendly bosom of the middle of the NHL standings. Perhaps one of the most uncanny attractions in modern memory is this organization’s magnetic fascination with the median.

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There’s a heap of bad luck behind Calgary’s (probable) 9th place finish in the West. They picked Dustin Wolf 4th from last in 2019, and he just so happened to emerge when the club desperately needed to pick inside the top-10.

Being completely unable to draft or develop a goalie for nearly 40 years and then dialling one in exactly when his exceptional performance will cost you a first-rounder, is, well…very Flames.

So, Conroy, who has kind of leaned into the rebuild so far, is faced with a forked path. Continue to rebuild? Or pivot to contention?

“Rebuild,” of course, is a contentious term in Calgary. A four-letter word in the front office, it is rarely uttered publicly and almost always downgraded to “retool” by both the franchise and the scribes who follow it.

Ownership and management would no doubt prefer to accelerate through the turn, and Wolf could be the rationalizing factor to make that decision.

In reality, “rebuild vs contend” is a false choice.

The real one, the one team has consistently shrunk from for decades, is:

Do you want to build a truly great team?

or

Do you just desperately want to avoid being bad?

Sometimes (often!), these things align. But for the Flames, they are mutually exclusive paths.

It will be the easiest thing in the world for Calgary not to be bad in the short term. They can re-sign Andersson and pursue some notable free agents in the summer with their ample cap space.

They can cross their fingers and hope that everyone below 26 takes a step forward and that everyone over 30 hangs on. Maybe Wolf becomes the best puck stopper in the game, and maybe they can be a Wildcard team in 12 months.

But that’s not building a true contender. It’s making marginal upgrades so to avoid the pain of being bad.

I get it. Being bad sucks. It sucks for the fans, it sucks for the players and it sucks for management. It sucks for the marketing department trying to sell season ticket renewals.

But the league is explicitly designed to reward bad teams. The game team plays on the ice is different than the one the franchise plays off of it.

Every enduring contender and quasi-dynastic team you can name over the last 20 years (aside from Vegas), bottomed out, picked high, and built around elite, era-defining superstars. If you want to be one of the best teams in the league - consistently - then you need a cohort of stars (anchored around at least one superstar) playing together through their peak years (22-28).

Ovehckin recently passed Gretzky on the all-time goals-scoring list. Washington picked him first overall in 2004 after winning the draft lottery. One wonders how drastically different the org would be today had they picked Travis Zajac instead.

Calgary’s never picked first overall. In part because they’ve always found reasons, every off-season, to not be bad.

Treliving pulled this when Gaudreau and Tkachuk left. Adding Huberdeau, Weegar, and Kadri was supposed to pry the contention window back open, but it simply saddled the team with an unwieldy hybrid of a roster that drove Sutter bonkers and chased him back into retirement.

It also prevented the club from doing what it should have in the face of that calamity: Rebuilt with extreme aggression.

For my part, I’d prefer the team finally stop fleeing the spectre of being bad. I’m old enough to remember the one period in their timeline when the Flames were truly, abjectly feared as the best team in the league. They won a cup, watched their stars scatter to the wind, and then tumbled down a rabbit hole for decades.

This fanbase has been sustained for too long by a few short bursts of light that are are rapidly dimming. But even those reprieves were paced by towering, unforgettable talents like Iginla and Gaudreau.

Calgary needs more of those. And, what’s more, they need to finally assemble several of them at the same time, so they can stop recklessly grasping at the coattails of favorites and champions every year, happy enough to battle for 8th.

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The assignment in the halls of the Flames front office should be very clear heading into next season.

DO NOT FINISH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CONFERENCE.

Emboss it on the office windows. Write it in the sky downtown.

It’s a dereliction of duty to let this roster fall back up into the mushy middle. This is a deceptively simple mission in principle, but one the team will likely fight against tooth and nail (as is their habit).

The start of the rebuild was relatively easy. The tough decisions were made by the players. Lindholm, Tanev, and Hanifin all spurned offers from the club. Zadorov and Toffoli asked out, Markstrom and Mangiapane were happy to leave. That was a de facto rebuild, one that encroached upon the team like dusk on the last day of summer.

But now Conroy et al. need to take the next step and liquidate as many members of the 30+ club as possible. This will further stock their cupboards and kick out a listing leg of the stool that’s currently propping them up.

This should be a rebuild made purposeful, done intentionally, and with conviction. Not swayed by a 5-game winning or losing streak mid-season or by the opportunity to maybe sign a fading star in free agency.

Rebuild right, pick early and often, and give Wolf the kind of teammates he can backstop to a cup, and not a parade of white-knuckle wildcard scramble fights every April.

A little bit better or much worse, those are the choices this summer.

The former gets you nowhere meaningful. It’ll just feel a lot less painful in the short term.

The latter won’t be fun, at least not right away. It also comes with no guarantees and a heap of risk. But it’s the only type of gamble that might actually return this club to a place that only a few of us still remember.