Here we will look at the Flames roster heading into the off season and what needs to be done in order to ice a competitive team.
Bold = Available Players
Ryan Smyth - Jason Spezza - ?
?-?-?
Jason Chimera - Eric Belanger - Jeff Hamilton
Ryane Clowe - Richard Park - Ruslan Fedotenko
Sergei Zubov - Ruslan Salei
Matt Carle - Tim Gleason
Andreas Lilja - Mike Rathje
Freddy Meyer
Martin Biron
?
As we can see there is plenty of holes up front. We need an entire second line and a RW for Jason Spezza. The third and fourth lines are pretty set and having a franchise center is nice but the forward core does need a lot of work. Perhaps a move of Smyth will be necessary to bring in two young 20-25 goal scorers that could maybe score 25-30 one day in the NHL and rerate decent in the sim, then hope Spezza can turn them into 35 goal scorers for this franchise. I think that might be the best bet. Sign a UFA or two for the second line will also be top priority going into UFA. Just put pieces in place to take a run at a championship for the 2008 season.
The defense is looking nice. I think I am going to try and move top offensive defenseman Zubov for a younger D-man that fits in better with age, try and grab a top six winger too. I like Salei, Gleason and Carle so we will have to build around those three. With nothing really in the pipeline have to look at upgrading the defense, Piskula and Gilbert are probably closest to making it to the show but they are just going to be bottom pair guts likely.
Martin Biron will be this teams number one goalie moving forward and the main reason why we will look to go for a championship in the 2008 season. He will not receive the best of rerates this year but next season with an emerging Flyers team could win 35+ games and have a sv% above .910 should become a top goaltender in the league. We will look to grab a 1B goalie for next year and a goalie who can play 20 games in the following years.
I have some nice pieces on this team but work will need to be done to build this Flames franchise into a perennial contender.
Farm Players
Jim Slater
Fredrik Sjostrom
Pascal Dupuis
Jeff Cowan
Curtis Brown
Doug Murray
Players who will not be re-signed
Dominik Hasek
Pierre Dagenais
Mike Ricci
Marc Chouinard
Alex Henry
Top 20 Prospects
Robbie Schremp
Perttu Lindgren
Michal Neuvirth
Andrei Taratukhin
Kirill Tulupov
Tomas Pospisil
Rhett Rakhshani
Devan Dubnyk
Shawn Matthias
Tyler Eckford
Joe Piskula
Curtis McElhinney
James Reimer
Chad Rau
Alexei Mikhnov
Richard Petiot
Tim Ramholt
Tom Gilbert
Anton Axelsson
David Van Der Gulik
The prospect system has a lot of hit and miss guys. These are who I feel are the best prospects in the system. Hopefully some of these guys develop and help my build to contention. I think the top seven will play a role in the NHL one day and then if half of the remaining 13 make it that would be sweet. Don’t really have picks for this draft but that’s OK, I will do what I can.
The Flames organization is in good hands.