For the last 23 years (13 with The Hockey News) Dobber Hockey has reviewed each team from a fantasy-hockey standpoint and graded them.

The 24th annual review will appear here on Dobber Hockey throughout the summer. This is not a review of the likely performance on the ice or in the standings, but in the realm of fantasy hockey both for the season ahead as well as the foreseeable future. Offensively, will the team perform? Are there plenty of depth options worthy of owning in keeper leagues? What about over the next two or three years? These questions are what we take into consideration when looking at the depth chart and the player potential on that depth chart.

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Gone: Blake Coleman, Victor Olofsson, Olli Maatta, Ryan Lomberg, John Beecher, Justin Kirkland, Jake Bean

Incoming: Simon Nemec, Maxim Tsyplakov, Jake Middleton

Impact of Changes

The real roster surgery happened months before the summer. Calgary finished 34-39-9 for 77 points, 29th overall, and spent the second half tearing down: Rasmus Andersson to Vegas in January, then MacKenzie Weegar and Nazem Kadri out within days of each other in early March, with the Andersson and Kadri deals each bringing back a future first-round pick. So, the offseason class is small, and it did nothing for a team that scored 2.54 goals per game, dead last in the league. The arrivals carried 46 points of last season’s production while the seven departures took 101, a net loss of some 55 points from the NHL’s worst offense. The bet is entirely internal, and the Fantasy Guide‘s own numbers make the case for it: Calgary finished last in the league in five-on-five team shooting percentage at 9.2, with Zayne Parekh at 6.5 and Matt Coronato at 7.0, and the Guide calls Matvei Gridin‘s low percentage bad puck luck outright. The Guide’s projections follow the regression logic rather than the standings: Coronato 57 points, Gridin 55, Jonathan Huberdeau 50, Morgan Frost 48, Nemec 46, Connor Zary 43, Joel Farabee 41. Coronato (192 career games) and Zary (191) have also both reached the experience level where forwards typically break out.

The one meaningful move addressed the other half of the problem. Calgary paid for Nemec twice. To get him from New Jersey on June 23, it sent out the two firsts the teardown had just collected with Vegas’s 2027 from the Andersson trade and Colorado’s 2028 from the Kadri deal, plus the 35th overall pick in June’s draft and prospect Etienne Morin; Calgary’s own first-round picks stayed home. Then it spent $36.25 million over five years to sign him on July 6. The job is quarterbacking a power play that converted 16.2 percent of its chances, 31st in the league. The battle for that job is the most fantasy-relevant story of Calgary’s September: Nemec against Parekh for PP1. Dobber bets Nemec on pedigree and NHL experience (68 games and 26 points for the Devils last season), and the loser is the obvious choice to run the second unit. Jake Middleton, acquired from Minnesota on July 2 for Coleman and Määttä, joins holdover Zach Whitecloud to stabilize the kids at five-on-five.

Ready for Full Time: Matvei Gridin, Zayne Parekh, Hunter Brzustewicz

Gridin is the headliner. The Fantasy Prospects Report does not even profile him; it already treats him as established. He put up 20 points in 37 games as a teenager, spent his minor-league stint taking over the AHL, and enters camp with PP1 billing. The Guide gives him the full treatment: its top breakout pick, a cap-bargain tag, and a sleeper call of 60 points at 20 percent odds. When Calgary scored on the power play with him on the ice, he had a point on 70 percent of those goals, second on the team. Yet he still sits just 137th on the Dobber draft list. That gap is name recognition, not talent, so draft him in every keeper format before the name catches up.

Parekh is the Report’s number two defense prospect, a blue chip with an Evan Bouchard comparison. His 9 points in 37 games look thin, but the team spent the year admitting he was between levels, and he reminded everyone of the ceiling with 13 points in 7 World Junior games. The Nemec trade complicates his short-term power-play path and does nothing to his long-term value; two units need quarterbacks and losing the September battle costs him the best one, not the job.

Brzustewicz arrives with less noise. The Report slots him 16th among defense prospects with a Devon Toews comparison and tags him for this fall after 7 points in 34 games at just over 16 minutes a night.

Samuel Honzek, Brennan Othmann, and Rory Kerins should all get some time with the big club, and any lengthy injuries to a couple veteran forwards would mean a full-time role for any of the three, but the bevy of veterans should hold this trio at bay until the Trade Deadline. At that point, expect these guys to be more prominent in the lineup on a day-to-day basis.

Fantasy Outlook

The draft-day picture is stark: no Flame sits inside the top 120 of the Dobber draft list; Coronato leads at 124 with a 56.7-point projection and PP1 time, then Gridin at 137, Huberdeau at 165, Frost at 179, Nemec at 198 and Zary at 212. That is not a roster you build a fantasy team around, but it is a deep pool of late-round picks priced below the regression case the Guide itself lays out, and Coronato at 124 is cheap for a player the Guide projects at 25 goals whose five-on-five percentage has nowhere to go but up.

The veteran tier is mostly warnings. Ryan Strome (249) is the boom-or-bust name: 12 points in 19 games after escaping Anaheim’s press box, one year left on his deal, and an obvious Trade Deadline candidate. The Guide has Backlund riding into the sunset. Huberdeau’s season ended with February hip surgery, but he is expected to be 100 percent for camp, and his 165 slot prices the uncertainty in. The category specialists hold their value regardless of the standings: Martin Pospisil is the Guide’s banger pick, and Adam Klapka projects for 293 hits. The 2027 UFA column, headlined by Strome, Frost, and Tsyplakov, says the deadline-seller pattern has at least one more year to run, and the camp invite of Calgary-born Alex Nylander, who scored 53 points for the Calder Cup champion Toronto Marlies, is a PTO flyer rather than a plan.

The crease is the stable asset. Wolf’s win total will track a rebuilding roster, but the Guide projects 58 games, 24 wins and a 2.85 goals-against average, and he sits 28th among goalies on the draft list because the starts are guaranteed even if the wins are not. Devin Cooley (26 starts, .909, goalie number 65) is the cheap handcuff and outplayed Wolf’s raw save percentage in the small sample.

The two-year view is the reason to care. The teardown plus the Nemec swap leaves a young core of Gridin, Parekh, Coronato, Zary, Nemec and Wolf, who is signed for seven more years at $7.5 million, with Cole Reschny, Cullen Potter, Ethan Wyttenbach (led the NCAA in scoring as a freshman). Then there is the nine-pick 2026 draft class behind them, led by sixth-overall defenseman Carson Carels and including Jack Hextall. The fantasy problem is concentration: with no current top-120 asset, the portfolio only pays if at least two of the kids hit at once. The pieces for that are now actually in the building, which was not true last season.

A year ago, this team slid from a B- to a C by drifting. This summer the direction finally turned coherent: a real swing at a power-play quarterback, two blue-chip rookies graduating at once, a locked-in young starter in goal, and the Guide’s own luck numbers arguing the young shooters are better than their percentages. But the grade measures the offseason, and this one added zero proven scoring to the league’s worst offense. The only NHL arrivals were a defense-first defenseman and a fourth-liner, and no Flame cracks the draft list’s top 120. The keeper portfolio is better than the one graded a year ago; the single-season rosters of 2026-27 will barely notice. That holds the grade where it was.

Fantasy Grade: C (last year was C)

Check out the rest of the Dobber team previews here.