Mikael Backlund: The Last Flame From 2022, Chasing One More Record

Every other player from Calgary’s 2022 playoff run is gone. Gaudreau, Tkachuk, Lindholm, Markstrom, Andersson: traded, signed elsewhere, or moved on, one by one, over four years. The Hockey News put a number on it this month: Mikael Backlund is the only skater still in the lineup who played a Stanley Cup playoff game for this franchise. Everyone else from that team is somewhere else. He is not.

The Flames' game-winning goal over the Dallas Stars, 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs, via the Calgary Flames on X

Nineteen years, one team

Calgary drafted Backlund 24th overall in 2007. He is entering his 19th season with the organization that picked him, still on the same roster, now as its captain.

The bridge to a new building

Backlund signed a two-year extension in September 2025, $6.5 million total, a $3.25 million average annual value, running through the 2026-27 and 2027-28 seasons. That second year matters for reasons beyond the cap hit: it is the season Scotia Place opens. The contract that keeps him a Flame is also the contract that keeps him around long enough to lead the team into the new building.

The 21st captain

The Flames made it official on September 27, 2023. General manager Craig Conroy did not frame it as a new decision so much as a formality catching up to reality:

“Mikael Backlund is our captain. He has been our captain for some time. Today we are excited to extend Mikael for two more seasons and officially add the captaincy to his jersey.”

He is the 21st captain in franchise history.

Mikael Backlund named the 21st captain in Calgary Flames history, via the Calgary Flames on X

He already has the trophy for it

Backlund won the King Clancy Memorial Trophy for the 2022-23 season, awarded at the NHL Awards in Nashville on June 27, 2023. The Clancy does not go to the best player in the league. It goes to the player whose leadership and humanitarian work off the ice match what he does on it. Calgary had already been treating him like a captain for years before the letter caught up.

Mikael Backlund wins the King Clancy Memorial Trophy, via the Calgary Flames on X

The number he is actually chasing

Jarome Iginla played 1,219 games in a Flames sweater, the franchise record. Backlund is sitting second all-time, at 1,148 through the end of the 2025-26 season. The gap is closing, and the new extension gives him a real runway to close it.

There is a second number that gets less attention: Backlund leads the entire franchise, every player in team history, in expected plus-minus, at 78.2. Iginla owns the scoring records. Al MacInnis owns the possession numbers. The quietest record in the book belongs to Backlund, and it is the one that describes exactly what he has always been paid to do.

The identity that never changed

In January 2018, Athletic writer Kent Wilson broke down that season’s Flames roster line by line and landed on a simple description for Backlund’s unit: “tenacity, grind-them-down,” set against the flash of the Monahan line on the other side of the lineup. Wilson also noted something else that stretch: whoever Calgary put next to Backlund tended to play better than they had anywhere else. The tag that stuck around the league for that effect, some version of “the bump,” traces back to columns like that one.

Eight years later, it is the same read. Different linemates, different decade, same effect.

Nineteen seasons in, still playing

Backlund turns 37 in March. He played all 82 games in 2025-26 and put up 17 goals, 26 assists, and 43 points, a full-season workload at an age when most careers have already wound down.

The read

None of this reads as sentiment. Calgary did not extend a soon-to-be-37-year-old center for two years and $3.25 million a season out of loyalty alone. They extended him because the underlying numbers say he can still do the job, and because the alternative, a rebuild with no thread back to the last team that actually made the playoffs, is a harder sell to a fan base that remembers 2022.

Backlund is not just the last man standing from that team. He is the bridge from what the Flames were to whatever they turn into by the time Scotia Place opens. That is a lot to hang on one player. He has been doing exactly that, quietly, for nineteen years.

Independent commentary. Not affiliated with the Calgary Flames. Player facts verified against public hockey media as of July 2026; see the research trail before publication.