The Nemec Bet Was Bold. The Injury List May Make It Irrelevant.
The declaration was clear enough when Calgary signed Simon Nemec to a five-year, $36.25 million deal on July 6. The Flames were announcing a philosophy: defense first, cornerstone piece secured, rebuild from the blue line out. Forty-eight losses will clarify your priorities, and the front office made theirs legible. The problem is that a philosophy requires bodies to execute it, and right now Calgary is running short on those.
Eight players were unavailable heading into this stretch of the offseason — Huberdeau, Bean, Honzek, Zary, Mews, Kuznetsov, Hanley, and Bahl. That is not a depth chart with a few gaps. That is a depth chart with a hole in the floor. I wrote about this collision in late July, when the Nemec signing still felt like momentum. It feels different now. When you're rebuilding around a cornerstone defenseman and your injury list includes two other defensemen and one of your most expensive forwards, the cornerstone starts to look a little exposed.
The Huberdeau situation sits at the center of this. He managed only 41 games last season, posting 22 points — numbers that would be underwhelming for a depth player, let alone someone The Athletic recently ranked as carrying one of the NHL's worst contracts. The durability concern isn't new; it has followed him to Calgary like a shadow. Dustin Wolf's extension drew praise in that same Athletic piece as one of the league's best deals, which tells you something about how the organization's contracts are aging at very different rates. One player is the future. The other is an expensive question mark who can't stay healthy.
The offensive picture was already grim before the injury list compounded it. Nazem Kadri led the team with 35 points in 47 games, a respectable individual pace that nonetheless exposed how thin the supporting cast was — Mikael Backlund, Rasmus Andersson, and Morgan Frost all finished with 27 points apiece, a cluster that speaks more to parity of mediocrity than genuine depth. Matt Coronato and Joel Farabee each cracked 20 points but both finished deep in the red on plus-minus. Blake Coleman, one of the few forwards to finish in positive territory at +6, is now in Minnesota. The team subtracted one of its few functioning pieces while the injury list swallowed several others.
The historical precedent here is not encouraging. Rebuilds that prioritize the blue line while carrying unresolved forward-depth crises tend to produce one thing reliably: better-defended losses. The 34-48 record last season came with a goal differential of -0.57 per game. Adding Nemec addresses the structural problem on defense, but it does not score goals, and Calgary's road record — 27% wins away from home — was never purely a defensive failure. It was a team that couldn't generate offense consistently enough to survive hostile environments. That problem remains entirely unsolved, and the injury list means it may arrive at training camp worse than it left the season.
My read is this: the Nemec signing is the right long-term move, and I'll stand on that. A young, cost-controlled defenseman on a five-year commitment is exactly the kind of anchor a rebuilding team needs. But the timeline for this retool just got longer, not shorter. If Huberdeau misses significant time again, if Zary and Honzek aren't ready, if the center depth behind Kadri and Backlund remains as thin as it looks right now — the Flames will spend another season discovering their offensive limitations in real time. The bet on Nemec was bold. Whether it matters depends on whether anyone around him can put the puck in the net.