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If soon-to-be free agents on the Calgary Flames’ roster weren’t re-signed by the trade deadline, they were getting moved.
The GM has been consistent about that since the day he was hired.
And maybe today, now that the dust has cleared, it might appear that Conroy’s plan the whole time was to trade away as many veterans as possible and get younger.
But as the first-year GM reiterated after Friday’s deadline, that simply wasn’t the case.
“I couldn’t get them signed. I tried up to a week ago and just couldn’t do it,” Conroy said. “I had to stick to what (I said on the day I was hired). It feels like it was yesterday, but it was a long time ago. If I couldn’t get them done, I had to move them along.”
In the end, Conroy traded away five of the seven prominent players who were set to become unrestricted free agents.
Tyler Toffoli was dealt before last year’s draft. Nikita Zadorov was moved after his agent went public with a trade request. Elias Lindholm was traded during the all-star break, and then Chris Tanev and Noah Hanifin were shipped out shortly before the deadline.
Mikael Backlund re-signed and Oliver Kylington is still with the team, but there’s confidence he’ll re-up with the Flames. Kylington missed a season-and-a-half while he attended to his mental health, but has looked great since returning to the lineup.
It’s tempting to look at the five guys Conroy moved away and see them as being part of one big plan, but the reality is the situation with each was different and evolved over the 10 months since Conroy was hired as GM.
The Flames were working to get a few of them re-signed before the season started, for example, but when the team misfired coming out of the gate and stumbled to a six-game losing streak, the situation changed.
The Flames were a little more hesitant to commit to a core that looked so flat and the players themselves understandably wondered whether Calgary presented the best place for them to compete for a Stanley Cup moving forward.
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“I think it was a little bit the players and us,” Conroy explained. “We wanted to see where it was going and see how we were going to do. I think as we turned the corner and turned it around, we picked up conversations again and like I said, it takes two people to agree to a deal and we just couldn’t get it done.
“As much as we loved the players and are thankful that they were here and what they did for the organization, we knew it was time and had to move on.”
That’s a lesson Conroy learned the hard way when he was assistant GM and Brad Treliving was calling the shots for the Flames.
Famously, the Flames gambled on getting Johnny Gaudreau re-signed in the summer of 2022. They thought he would commit to a long-term contract right up until almost the last minute, when he declared his intention to go elsewhere shortly before the free agency window opened.
That left them no time to try to trade him and get assets in return.
It was a bad bet by Treliving, plain and simple, and it wasn’t the only time something similar had happened with the Flames.
Now that Conroy is in charge, he doesn’t intend on letting players walk for nothing.
“It wasn’t just Gaudreau,” Conroy said. “(T.J.) Brodie left. (Mark) Giordano left. There was more, as I think back over time. That was the most recent that made me think if I can’t get things done, to regroup and move forward. We’re going to have to get assets for people and even if you’re in a situation where maybe right now we’re battling for the playoffs … but to get assets and regroup we had to do it.
“To let those guys go just didn’t make any sense. Even though we wanted to get Johnny signed, I think we thought we were going to, and when we didn’t it does hurt not to have anything back for him.”
With all that in mind, Conroy did what he could to re-sign his soon-to-be free agents over the past 10 months.
But when they showed they weren’t interested in making a long-term commitment — as was their right — it left him no choice.
Trading them all might not have been the original plan, but letting them walk away for nothing was never going to happen.
daustin@postmedia.com
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