Year One of the Money: Dustin Wolf, After the Season That Went Wrong

Dustin Wolf has allowed 12 goals on 59 shots in his first two starts of the season, and both of them were 6-1 losses to Seattle. It is the first month of a seven-year, $52.5 million contract, and it follows the only season of his career in which he was below average for a stretch long enough to matter.

That is the uncomfortable version. Here is the fuller one: the two starts say less about Wolf than the scores do, last season’s drop has a shape you can see in the numbers, and the contract was signed knowing about exactly none of it.

This season: two starts, two 6-1 losses

The opener on October 1 was over early. Seattle led 3-0 after one, and FlamesNation’s recap put it plainly: Wolf “was asked to be heroic early on,” and it was too much to ask. He made 26 saves on 32 shots.

The best moment of his night came with the game already gone. In the second period, a Seattle dump-in hit the stanchion and kicked into the slot, and Wolf went across on his side to take it away. The Flames posted it within minutes, and it changed nothing on the scoreboard. That is roughly the story of his week.

Devin Cooley started on October 3 in Vancouver, a 4-1 loss, and Wolf went back in on October 4 in Seattle. Three goals by 7:40 of the first, 21 saves on 27 shots, another 6-1. Ryan Huska did not put that one on his goalie.

“Early on, some of the shots that he faced, you don’t want to give those up,” Huska said. “Their guys with flips over the top and we’re losing footraces in those situations, so we have to be better in front of him.”

Cooley got the net back Thursday at home against Colorado, and it went no better: a 7-3 loss, 23 saves on 30 shots, all seven goals at even strength. The game was tied 1-1 in the second period when the Avalanche scored three times in 4:54, the first of them at the end of a long shift in the Calgary zone, the last a Nathan MacKinnon one-timer.

So the starts have gone Wolf, Cooley, Wolf, Cooley, and the Flames are 0-4, outscored 23-6. Wolf is at .797, Cooley at .818. Two starts each are not a sample, and nobody’s save percentage behind that is a verdict.

What went wrong last season

Wolf’s rookie year is the reason the contract exists. Fifty-three games, a .910 save percentage, second in the Calder voting to Lane Hutson, and, by the club’s own Sportlogiq numbers, eighth in the league in goals saved above expected per 60 minutes at five-on-five.

Then 2025-26: 57 games, 55 of them starts, 23-29-3, a 3.01 goals-against average and a .899 save percentage.

The easy explanation would be workload or a worse team in front of him. The shot counts don’t support the second half of that. He faced about 29 shots a game as a rookie and about 27 last season. Fewer shots, and more of them went in.

The season also wasn’t one long slide. Month by month, from his game log:

Month	Games	Save %
October	10	.887
November	10	.894
December	11	.920
January	9	.882
February	3	.946
March	10	.879
April	4	.921

December was the goalie Calgary paid for. January was not, and January is when Cooley was ill and the Flames leaned on Wolf for nearly every start. He was candid about it at the time.

“I’ve made a couple mistakes over the last couple of games that have ended up in the back of the net,” Wolf told reporters in January. “It can be frustrating, because you want to be perfect in a sense, you’re playing for your teammates and trying to keep as many pucks out of the net, but I try to do my best and a couple of errors have cost me.”

Wolf vs. Cooley: the other goalie is his closest friend

Calgary has the only all-California goalie tandem in the NHL, and the two grew up about half an hour apart: Wolf in Gilroy, Cooley in Los Gatos. Their first NHL meeting was the 2023-24 season finale at the Saddledome, Cooley in a San Jose sweater, the first NHL game with two Bay Area-raised goalies. Calgary won 5-1.

That summer Cooley signed with the Flames, and Wolf got in touch first. “I actually don’t know him personally, but he reached out as soon as I signed,” Cooley said that day.

On paper they could hardly be further apart. Wolf was the 214th pick of his draft, stands 6-foot and is 25, on $7.5 million a year through 2032-33. Cooley was never drafted, stands 6-foot-5 and is 29, and Calgary was his fourth NHL organization. When the Flames signed him in 2024, The Athletic described him as insurance. He has never minded the role. “I’ve been a backup in every single league,” he told Postmedia in October 2025. “I have a lot of experience being a backup and I’ve had a lot of experience going two weeks without playing.” He signed a two-year extension last December at $1.35 million a year, through 2027-28.

And on last season’s numbers, the backup was better. Cooley’s line was 31 games, 26 starts, a 2.69 goals-against average and a .909 save percentage.

Neither of them talks about it like a rivalry. When Cooley re-signed, he said the deal let him “play behind one of the best goaltenders in the world.” Wolf, last December, said Cooley had helped him through the worst of the season:

“There’s been stretches of the year where things haven’t gone the way I’ve liked. You see him playing so well and you want to follow that up, but also just the way he thinks, the way his mind works, he’s very intelligent. It definitely puts things in perspective of, it’s one day at a time and nothing is guaranteed. Sometimes you just need a little reminder of that.”

That is not an argument for a goalie controversy. It is an argument that the Flames have a real tandem, and that the cheapest way to protect a $7.5 million goalie in a bad start is a $1.35 million one who can take a night. Four games in, they have split the net evenly, and neither has had much help.

Why does Dustin Wolf jump before every period?

If you have watched him play, you have seen it. Before each period, Wolf squirts his crease with his water bottle, shakes out his legs, squats and jumps as high as the gear allows, then pushes back until he hits the crossbar. The Flames’ own pregame video calls it “a tradition every game, the Wolfie jump.” It is also the moment on the cover of this piece.

There is no grand reason, and he has never pretended there is one.

“Honestly, I don’t know how it came to be,” Wolf said on Sportsnet 960’s The Big Show in 2023. “My last year in Everett, I just started jumping for whatever reason. I don’t know if I thought I was a bunny or what. It’s just kind of become a staple in my pre-period routine. It’s just stuck.”

So it started in junior, with the WHL’s Everett Silvertips, and came with him through the AHL to Calgary. It is not borrowed, he says, from Carter Hart, who has a jump of his own. Hart was Everett’s starter in 2017-18, when Wolf was a 16-year-old rookie backing him up. “You can learn so much from watching a guy like that over the course of a season,” Wolf told the Everett Herald the next fall.

“Hartsy gives me crap for it all the time because he has his jump and he thought I stole it from him,” Wolf told the Calgary Sun in 2023. “I’m always like, ‘No, I don’t know why. It just came out of nowhere and I started jumping.’”

Hart now plays for Vegas, and the two have met once in the NHL: Hart won, 6-3, on April 2. He is also one of the five players from the 2018 world junior team whom Hockey Canada suspended in August. All five were acquitted of all criminal charges in July 2025. Our story on those suspensions explains what they cover.

By his Calder season it had a name and a meaning. Wolf calls it his “jump for joy,” and in January 2025 he told The Athletic’s Julian McKenzie what it is for now:

“It’s a privilege to play in this league, play hockey in general,” Wolf said. “I don’t think there was necessarily a reason on why it came about. As soon as I jump, it’s go time now.”

The Sun reported that he cringes at the word superstition. Jordan Sigalet, the Flames’ goaltending coach, told the Sun in 2023 that Wolf gets “almost two feet and lands it perfectly every time.”

His general manager has made his peace with it. “You always worry a little bit about the jump, to be honest,” Craig Conroy told The Athletic. “Ever since I can remember, he’s been doing it with the Wranglers. It’s working for him. So, we’ll just keep the jump going.”

Wolf knows the risk. “Hopefully, my landing percentage stays at 100%,” he said. “Because there would probably be some good pictures on Twitter if it wasn’t.”

Why does Dustin Wolf have Post Malone on his helmet?

Because Wolf is a fan. Travis Michael of TM Kustoms, who paints Wolf’s masks, said on the GoalieMasks101 podcast in May 2026 that Wolf is a big Post Malone fan, and that the 2024-25 Johnny Gaudreau tribute mask was “the first mask with Post Malone.” Has Post Malone seen it? Michael said he was not sure, and would have to ask Wolf.

What it looks like. A small black-and-white portrait of the rapper in a hat, on the side of the helmet next to the cage. The clearest view is an AP close-up by Jeff Roberson that Sportsnet ran, taken in St. Louis in January 2025. The same mask was the first with a wolf’s head across the forehead, Michael said, while the lettering on the chin has stayed the same since Wolf’s Everett days.

Why Dallas noticed. Post Malone grew up near Dallas and is, in NHL.com’s words, “a noted Dallas sports fan.” Five days after he visited the Stars’ dressing room in Salt Lake City, Wolf started for Calgary in Dallas on December 8, 2024, and Stars fan accounts spotted the face on the Flames goalie’s helmet.

Who paints it. Michael is a Victoria, B.C., airbrush artist who met Wolf through the Silvertips’ equipment staff and has painted his masks since Wolf’s first season as Everett’s starter, the year after he backed up Hart. His advice to the goalies he paints for is to “make it like a yearbook,” something to look back on in five years.

The back of the mask was Wolf’s idea. After Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew were killed in August 2024, Wolf asked for Johnny on the backplate in a home red Flames sweater, stick raised to the crowd, with the numbers 13 and 21, purple Gatorade and Skittles. “Dustin had the team reach out to the family to see if they would be okay with it,” Michael told The Hockey News. The family said yes. “I only knew him very little, was only around him very little, but being an American … thought it was really important to honour him and his family and his kids,” Wolf told CBC that October. When Johnny’s father, Guy, skated with the Flames that December, Wolf said the first thing he asked was to see it: “Spin around, let me see this mask.”

Paying tribute to Johnny, @NHLFlames on X

This season’s mask. ESPN’s 2026-27 mask preview describes “a huge wolf and flames, plus a cowboy on the side.” It does not mention Post Malone.

What year one actually has to prove

The contract was signed on September 9, 2025, before the season that went sideways. Calgary bought the rookie year and the résumé behind it: two WHL goaltender of the year awards, the AHL’s MVP, all from the 214th pick of his draft.

Wolf signed with a season still left on his old deal, so his own count that day was eight.

“Eight more years here in the city,” Wolf said. “Now you don’t have those contract talks looking over your shoulder; you can just go play. Hopefully I have eight more years of not having to worry about that and now I can worry about playing hockey and helping my team win and go from there.”

What the contract did not buy was certainty about which of last season’s months is the real one. That’s the job for this one. Not October’s numbers behind a team that has scored three goals, but whether December 2025 is the baseline and January 2026 the exception, or the other way around.