Zero Points and a Waived Forward: Inside the Numbers of the Flames' Historic 0-5 Start

The Flames have lost their first five games of a season for the first time in franchise history, The Canadian Press noted after Saturday’s loss to Anaheim. They are 0-5-0, they have been outscored 27-8, and on Monday morning they were the only team in the NHL without a point.

That’s the report. The rest of this is about what the numbers say, what has actually been said about Ryan Huska, and what hasn’t.

The Flames’ worst start in franchise history

Five games, five regulation losses:

• Oct 1, vs Seattle: lost 6-1 on opening night
• Oct 3, at Vancouver: lost 4-1
• Oct 4, at Seattle: lost 6-1
• Oct 8, vs Colorado: lost 7-3
• Oct 10, vs Anaheim: lost 4-2

We checked the franchise first the long way, through the league’s schedule data for every season back to 1972-73 in Atlanta. No Flames team had done it. The closest was 1997-98, which opened 0-3-2 back when games could end in a tie.

They play in Anaheim tonight.

What the numbers say about the 0-5 start

Here’s the part that gets lost. The Flames aren’t getting outshot. Over five games they have 140 shots on goal and have allowed 143. They rank 12th in the league in shots per game. The power play is converting at 20 per cent, 17th in the league. The penalty kill is at 86.7 per cent, 11th.

The goals are another matter. By our arithmetic from the league’s numbers, the goaltending has stopped 116 of 142 shots, a .817 save percentage. Dustin Wolf is at .816 in three starts and Devin Cooley at .818 in two. At the other end, the Flames are scoring on 5.7 per cent of their shots.

That is a team losing in its own net and at the other one. It is not a team being run out of its own building. Shot totals don’t measure shot quality, and nothing here says the Flames are giving up easy ones or not. But a team that breaks even on shots and loses 27-8 has a finishing problem and a goaltending problem before it has a system problem.

Is Ryan Huska on the hot seat?

On Oct 9, Elliotte Friedman talked about the Flames on NHL Now. “I think the one team everyone’s kinda looking at right now is Calgary,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s fair, but I recognize it’s kind of out there.”

He didn’t name Huska, and he didn’t have to: in a conversation about coaches under pressure, Calgary means the coach. But “I don’t know if that’s fair” is part of the same answer. Within two days a Flames blog account on X had cut it to “According to Elliotte Friedman, Ryan Huska may be on the hot seat!”

Friedman came back to it on his own podcast, 32 Thoughts, on Oct 12. “I kind of stepped in it a bit on NHL Network on Friday, which is no one’s fault but my own,” he said. “I think Craig Conroy is really loyal.” He put Calgary alongside Chicago and Philadelphia, said all three general managers are patient, and said “the wild cards are ownership.” What he had heard out of Calgary was concern about the two home losses, 6-1 to Seattle and 7-3 to Colorado: “You cannot be like that at home.” And he liked Saturday’s answer. “I thought those players and coaches gave a great answer,” he said. “They didn’t fold and they were competitive.”

As of Tuesday morning, we couldn’t find a named insider or Calgary beat reporter saying Huska’s job is in danger. We looked. We also couldn’t find anything public from general manager Craig Conroy since the season opened. The last time he talked about his coach at length was in September, on The Raw Mike Richards Show, as reported by Daily Hive. “He does a great job with our young guys,” Conroy said, and “I never question [the team] being prepared, focused, and having a game plan.”

Silence from a GM five games in doesn’t mean much either way. Worth saying so.

There’s one number that will keep coming up. Huska has coached 253 regular-season games for Calgary, two of them as a fill-in in 2021, without a playoff appearance. As of Oct 5, The Win Column had him fifth among coaches with the most games behind one team’s bench without a playoff appearance. Wayne Gretzky holds the top spot, 328 games in Phoenix. Huska passes him late this season if he’s still here.

What Huska said after the Ducks loss

After Saturday’s loss Huska didn’t sound like a man looking over his shoulder. He sounded like a coach putting it on the room.

“Every game we played this year, we’ve slowly been getting better, and that’s the most important thing,” he said. “Thought that was our best game to date.”

On the power play, he said that after the first one “there was a lot of people trying to make it happen on their own.”

And then the line that will get the reaction. “Players that are 23 to 26 that have been in the NHL for a while, I don’t consider them younger players,” Huska said. “They should be able to perform at a high level.”

The players weren’t far off. “The first 40 (minutes) was really good,” Matt Coronato said, “but we’ve got to get some wins.”

It was a different tone from a week earlier. After the 6-1 loss in Seattle, Huska’s word was “disconnected.” “One person goes off script right now for us and it seems to end up in the back of our net,” he said, per The Hockey News.

Calgary Flames: Ryan Huska's post-game media availability after the 4-2 loss to Anaheim (video, Oct. 10, 2026)

Why the Flames waived Connor Zary

You can’t talk about Huska and young players right now without Connor Zary.

Zary was a healthy scratch for the second game of the season, at Vancouver. On Oct 5 the Flames put him on waivers. Nobody claimed him, and he was assigned to the Wranglers on Oct 6. He carries a $3.775-million cap hit through 2027-28, and that, per Friedman, is why he wasn’t claimed. “Zary not being claimed is contract-related,” Friedman posted. “We will see if a trade can be worked out.” On 32 Thoughts he added that the Flames put Zary’s name on the general managers’ group chat the day before they waived him, and later that they had talked to Vancouver about a deal that would take a contract back.

Huska’s explanation, to Daily Hive, was about last season as much as the first two games: “A little bit of the pace, I would say, and the overhandling of pucks at times.”

He had said as much before the season started. “Our challenge with Connor is to find a way to use a little bit more pace and speed in his game,” Huska told Sportsnet in September. A day later he named Zary first among the forwards who had to get to the net: “Connor Zary has to go there, and he’s got to stand right in front of the goaltender’s eyes when it’s called for,” he said, adding Matt Coronato and Ryan Strome. Zary’s own account of last season was about his body. “Maybe my strength wasn’t quite there,” he said. “But I feel like now I had a really good summer.”

Zary didn’t hide how he took it. “If I stood here and told you I’m not pissed off, that would just be me lying,” he said at Wranglers practice on Oct 7. He wanted to “prove people wrong.” Asked about his future with the Flames: “I think that’s kind of up to them.” Two days later he scored and was first star in his first AHL game since 2023-24.

Was there a feud? Nobody involved has said so. On 32 Thoughts on Oct 8, Friedman put it to his co-host, Kyle Bukauskas, who lives in Calgary: “I guess it’s an open secret there that Zary and Huska didn’t see eye to eye, right?” Bukauskas called it “reading the tea leaves.” “There’s never anything publicly where they’ve come out and said as much,” he said, “but you can tell.” Friedman also said he had heard the Flames gave Zary permission to talk to other teams early last season, and that this was denied to him. Daily Hive wrote that Zary “never seemed to find a comfortable spot in the lineup” under Huska and was “juggled throughout lines constantly in 2025-26.” One fan site has written that Zary criticized Huska in his end-of-season interview last spring. We couldn’t find that interview or any quote from it. Until somebody produces one, it’s a story about a story.

What the record does show is a player whose numbers went the wrong way under this coach: 27 points in 54 games in 2024-25, 25 in 74 last season, with his ice time down from 16:04 a night to 14:22.

Is Ryan Huska the right coach for a rebuild?

This is where it turns into opinion, so here’s the case each way.

For Huska: if any coach in this market was hired for a teaching job, it’s him. The Trail, B.C., native, now 51, spent five seasons as an assistant in Kelowna and seven as head coach there, with a WHL title and a Memorial Cup final in 2009. Four seasons running this organization’s farm team in Adirondack and Stockton, 135-118-27. Five years as a Flames assistant before the top job in 2023. Conroy extended him for two years on Oct 2, 2025, through 2027-28, without announcing the value, and in May the club extended his entire staff through the same season: assistants Dave Lowry, Trent Cull and Cail MacLean, video coach Jamie Pringle and goaltending coach Jason LaBarbera.

And the complaint you hear most, that he won’t play the kids, doesn’t hold up. Simon Nemec, 22, leads the team in ice time at 21:16 a night. Zayne Parekh, 20, who ran the first power-play unit in the preseason, is playing just under 19 minutes. Matvei Gridin, 20, has played all five games and Samuel Honzek, 21, four of them. Whatever else is going on, the young players are on the ice.

Against: three full seasons, no playoffs. They came within one point in 2024-25 and then went backward, 34-39-9 last season. Coronato went from plus-6 to minus-29. Zary was waived at 25. And on Saturday the coach drew a line at 23 that puts most of his core on the wrong side of “young.”

The fair question isn’t whether he plays the kids. It’s whether they get better while he does.

Five games don’t fire a coach whose GM extended him a year ago. They do start the clock.