Morgan Frost Was the Other Guy in the Trade. He Led Calgary in Goals.

Daniel Briere did not sign Joel Farabee’s contract. Craig Conroy did sign Morgan Frost’s, five months after trading for him, and that is the difference between the two halves of the same deal.

Frost arrived in Calgary in the last week of January 2025 as the second name in a two-player trade, and for the rest of that season he did almost nothing. Then he won 56.8% of his faceoffs, scored 22 goals, and led the team. Here is the other side of the trade that part one described.

Calgary was not solving a cap problem

Philadelphia had a reason to move Farabee: the money. Briere said so out loud. Frost is the player in the deal who does not fit that explanation, and Conroy’s version of why Calgary wanted him is about the position, not the payroll.

“Morgan Frost is a center, a natural center, that we don’t have,” Conroy said. “Really nice playmaking. Great hands. Sees the ice. Vision.”

He also framed the pair as a timeline rather than a rescue.

“They’re at the right age. They’re 24 and 25-year-old guys that we can grow with, and that’s always been the plan.”

That is a general manager describing a plan, which is the sort of thing general managers say. What makes it worth quoting is that Calgary then acted on it twice: once at the deadline, and once with a chequebook.

The first 32 games looked exactly like Farabee’s

Frost scored three goals in 32 games after the trade. Farabee scored three in 31. The two of them arrived together, produced nothing together, and finished a season in which Calgary was 29th in the league in goals per game.

Briere had said the quiet part about both of them before they left: “We had higher hopes, I would say, for Morgan and Joel just maybe two years ago and guys were starting to go by them.” For two months in Calgary, that read as the correct assessment.

Then he led the team in goals

Season	Team	GP	G	A	P	FO%
2023-24	Philadelphia	71	13	28	41	49.5
2024-25	Philadelphia	49	11	14	25	51.8
2024-25	Calgary	32	3	9	12	50.5
2025-26	Calgary	82	22	21	43	56.8

Twenty-two goals, 43 points, all 82 games. The 22 led the Flames. The 43 tied Mikael Backlund for second in team scoring. And the faceoff number is the one that moves most: 56.8% is seven points clear of where he was in his last full season in Philadelphia, which for a centre acquired specifically to be a centre is the part that reads as a real change rather than a hot year.

His career high in points is still 46, in 2022-23. His career high in assists is still 28, in 2023-24. He did not become a different player. He became a useful one in a role he had not been given.

The number nobody mentions

Frost scored eight power-play goals in 2025-26. He scored none shorthanded.

Farabee’s line is the exact inverse: four shorthanded, one on the power play. Same trade, same day, same 82 games, and Ryan Huska used them in opposite situations all season. Frost was on the first power-play unit and never killed a penalty. Farabee killed penalties and barely touched the power play.

That is not a coincidence of usage. It is the clearest evidence that Calgary did not acquire two versions of the same player, whatever the deal looked like on the wire.

Conroy paid him himself

On July 2, 2025, Calgary signed Frost to a two-year extension worth $8,750,000, a cap hit of $4,375,000 running through 2026-27. It pays a $3,875,000 base plus a $500,000 signing bonus in the first year and $4,375,000 in the second, and it carries a modified no-trade clause with an eight-team list attached to the 2026-27 season specifically.

One caution for anyone checking that themselves: the same contract page also lists an older two-year deal at $4,200,000 signed by Daniel Briere. That is the Philadelphia contract, not this one. Attach the wrong GM to it and the whole story inverts.

The distinction matters here more than it usually would. Farabee is playing out a contract that Philadelphia signed and Calgary absorbed. Frost is playing out one that Calgary chose, at a number Calgary set, after seeing him for 32 unconvincing games. One of those is a cap problem that resolved itself. The other is a bet.

Three games in

Calgary has scored three goals in three games this season and lost all three. Frost has one of them.

On Sunday in Seattle, down 5-0 in the third period, he tipped in a power-play goal at 14:25, set up by Matvei Gridin and Joel Farabee, the other half of this trade. It was the only goal Joey Daccord allowed in a 6-1 Kraken win. Frost played 17:51, second among Calgary forwards to Matt Coronato.

It is one goal, and it reads as one goal. It is also last season’s profile exactly: it came on the power play, from the centre who spent all of last season on Calgary’s first power-play unit. He has won 58.3% of his faceoffs through three games. He has also been on the ice for six more goals against than for, which on a team outscored 16-3 says more about the team than about him.

What he is now

He is a 27-year-old centre in the final season of a contract at $4,375,000, a modified no-trade clause that covers this season, coming off 22 goals, a full 82 games, and the best faceoff year of his career. He is not the player Philadelphia thought they were getting when they drafted him in 2017, and he is no longer the player they had stopped waiting on either.

The bet comes due in the summer of 2027, when he can become an unrestricted free agent. No extension has been signed: as of the first week of the season, CapWages still lists the two-year deal as his last. Twenty-two goals is a good year to have had before a negotiation.

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Previously in Roster Report: the other half of that trade. Joel Farabee arrived on a contract nobody else in the league would take at full price, scored 20, and killed penalties well enough to score four times doing it.