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How Fast Are the Calgary Flames? Breaking Down the Numbers

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1 month ago

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Martin Pospisil Flames

Have you ever wondered exactly where the Calgary Flames rank in terms of high-end speed?

It’s probably fair to say that most Flames fans can sense that their team isn’t the fastest in the NHL. They’re surely faster than some bottomfeeders, like the Chicago Blackhawks, but how do they hold up against the rest of the NHL?

Most can tell that the team is likely below average when it comes to hitting the blue lines with speed. With the help of NHL Edge, the league’s go-to for publicly available player-tracking tech, we can give ourselves a better idea of who is fast and who, well, isn’t. 

 

Context of Speed

We can first put a caveat down that not all teams need speed. 

Some teams move up the ice as a five-man unit. Former Flames skipper Darryl Sutter advocated for such an approach.  

You can see it in other teams, like the Golden Knights and Minnesota Wild, who subscribe to that concept. Maintaining a formation cuts down on transition opportunities (2v1s, 3v2s, etc.), which provide a much higher probability of scoring a goal than good old fashioned offensive zone 5v5 play.  

There are teams that only need to go as fast as the guy they are about to clobber on the forecheck. The Florida Panthers are a great example of a team that generates transition in a concerted combination of truculence and timely puck support.  

Caveats out of the way; the data implies that the Flames are slow.  

NHL Speed Bursts

Their 30th-ranked offense, 2.64 goals per game, can attribute much of its lack of success to a failure to find ways past neutral zone clogs.

An inability to hit the blue line with speed means more time for the defence to attack the puck carrier, more control of where the puck carrier hits the blue line, and more bodies able to line up in front of any given member of the Flames as they try to take the zone without going offside.  

To the eye test, that has to be the most significant difference between the Flames and the teams above them in the standings.

It’s surprising that their power play has found a way to run at 22.3%, but that is also why we have begun to see the Flames dumping the puck in so often at 5v4. Head Coach Ryan Huska has identified that possession entries aren’t what this roster is necessarily good at and has adjusted to assigning his stronger puck battlers to a powerplay spot.  

Matthew Coronato, or Blake Coleman, or Nazem Kadri, or Joel Farabee will fly in as the F1 and do their best to win the puck and start possession. Similar to what Florida does, except without the gratuitous violence.

A nice workaround by Huska.  

Then there is the penalty kill. You don’t necessarily need to be fast to kill a penalty. To be frank, the best verb to use when describing defending on the penalty kill might be “clog” or “timely clogging.”

With that said, Calgary’s lack of speed certainly factors into their 28th-place 72.1% PK rate.  

The players assigned to killing penalties are also some of the few players relied upon to hit the neutral zone with speed; be it attacking or defending. Most of them, most notably Rooney and Backlund, are also designated penalty killers.

Picture being the sole high-speed forechecker on your line and then also being expected to go out and run a cycling zone defence for a minute and twenty seconds before you can get a safe change.

Let’s examine the Flames forwards in terms of speed bursts per 60 minutes of ice time. The list goes from most minutes played to least. 

Calgary Flames Speed Bursts Per 60

Of the regulars, we clearly can see that Kevin Rooney does a lot of skating in his limited deployment as the fourth line center. The same goes for Justin Kirkland and Dryden Hunt. Frankly, it’s easier to skate like your hair is on fire when you play seven or eight minutes of 5v5 a night—or in Hunt’s case, having only dressed for one NHL game this season.

Excluded is Walker Duehr, who has hit some impressive speeds since joining the Sharks, and Anthony Mantha, who only played 13 games with the Flames and isn’t expected to play again this season. In Walker’s case, we can’t access individual game stats, so we can’t accurately measure exactly how fast he was in Calgary. 
 

Average Time on Ice 

Kevin Rooney: 7:22
Justin Kirkland: 8:39
Dryden Hunt: 12:12 

When we look at totals, we see a different picture.  

Calgary Flames Speed Burst Totals

Seen above is Huska’s tendency to shorten the bench as the game goes on. The guys bringing energy in a limited capacity take a seat for the top nine to either defend or press for a goal.

 

The Top Six

We also see underwhelming numbers from Jonathan Huberdeau and former Flame Andrei Kuzmenko—both playmakers in the classic mold. The former picks his spots to pick up speed very carefully, but does manage to glean out the odd clean breakaway or half-break.  

Nazem Kadri is an interesting one.  

Nazem Kadri Speed

Only four Flames posted slower metrics per 60 when it comes to hitting high speeds. Kadri can play the game fast in tight, but tends to let bad habits affect large areas of his game. Skating the puck through defenders doesn’t lead to generating space.  

Despite his eccentric style, both Kadri and Huberdeau are producing this season. It’s almost as if someone is doing the heavy lifting for them when it comes to generating space for them. 

 

Martin Pospisil

This eventually leads us to Calgary’s golden boy when it comes to high-end speed. We see from the charts that he’s the only true burner in the top six, although season-over-season, Matthew Coronato is making massive strides. Pun intended. 

Pospisil, 25, leads the team in hits by such a vast margin that you have to wonder if Calgary is a soft team. 

Hits Leaders: Calgary Flames 

Pospisil: 191
Blake Coleman: 108
Ryan Lomberg: 82
Kevin Rooney: 70
Justin Kirkland: 45 

The stat we’re looking for is Turnovers Generated, which by nature, is difficult to quantify.

Takeaways, don’t really answer this one either, as a timely hit or aggressive forecheck generating a sloppy pass doesn’t register as a takeaway. We have a long way to go in terms of advanced stats in the NHL.

Despite the lack of data accounting for Pospisil’s presence, we can see that he serves a purpose for Huberdeau and Kadri:

Winning pucks and generating space.

 

Boxer  

For those who have read George Orwell’s 1945 best seller, Animal Farm, you may be familiar with Boxer the horse.

“I will work harder!”

No matter what the problem was, Boxer solved it with hard work. He rarely received credit for carrying out most of the virtuous toil on the farm and certainly was never allowed to sleep in the house where the pigs eventually moved in. 

Without going any further into the book and what happens to Boxer, we can see from the data that Mikael Backlund is likely Calgary’s closest comparison to the farm’s allegory for the Russian working class.

 

Four Legs Good

Backlund leads all Flames forwards in ice time (1056:43), total speed bursts above 18mph (566), and posts above-average speed totals despite his heavy workload—all at the age of 35.  

It should come as no surprise that it’s commonly believed that the Vasteras, Sweden product was playing through an injury heading into the Four-Nations break.  

Much like Boxer, perhaps the team is leaning a bit too hard on Mikael this harvest. 

Sure, he’s capable, and the other horse, Clover (probably Pospisil,) is there to help when it comes to chasing down dump-ins, but the rebuild is young and Backlund has a long way to go if he is to lead by example for the next generation. 

 

Small Steps, Great Strides

It’s no easy task re-tooling a roster filled with established veterans. Every name you see in the top nine of a lineup is someone who has worked immensely hard to carve out a permanent gig in the NHL.

Addressing areas of weakness on a roster can take years, but General Manager Craig Conroy took a major step on Jan. 30, 2025, when he shipped out wingers Andrei Kuzmenko and Jakob Pelletier, a second-round pick in the 2025 NHL Entry Draft, and a seventh-round pick in the 2028 NHL Entry Draft in exchange for center Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee.

Andrei Kuzmenko Joel Farabee Jakob Pelletier Morgan Frost

Speed bursts per 60 minutes of ice time.


When it comes to high-end speed, Calgary made a major upgrade in trading with Flyers GM Daniel Briere.

 

The Flames Looking Forward

Roster turnover takes time. If it were up to a large contingent of fans, the Flames would have shipped out all but a few unmovable contracts and built from the ground up. As easy as it is to suggest the concept, the reality is that the Flames roster is shifting organically. Nine forwards who played at least one game for Calgary last year are now plying their trade elsewhere. The same goes for eight defencemen.

Are the Flames currently one of the slower teams in the NHL? The data implies that they are.

Is Conroy progressively addressing that issue?

Absolutely.

 

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