All Eight Flames Prospects in Windsor Have a Job in 2027-28. Here Is Where Each One Lands.

Windsor — Craig Conroy spent the week watching eight of his prospects at the World Junior Summer Showcase. When it wrapped yesterday, he had seen enough to put it plainly: “this is the future of the Calgary Flames.”

Take him literally and you can build the thing. Calgary has 16 players signed for 2027-28, the season Scotia Place opens, both goaltenders among them. Everyone else in the organization is competing for what is left, and eight of the candidates just finished on the same sheet of ice in Windsor.

Four of them project into the NHL lineup on opening night. Four project into Calgary. Not one of the eight is a year away from a job somewhere in this organization, which is the whole point.

The building is on the same clock. Scotia Place put out its own construction update three weeks ago, and the thing is going up fast enough that the fall 2027 date has stopped feeling theoretical:

Scotia Place: June construction update, presented by CANA

What they actually did in Windsor

Ten games in seven days. Here is how the eight finished, tallied from the official game reports rather than from anyone’s recap:

Prospect	GP	G	A	P
Ethan Wyttenbach (USA)	4	5	3	8
Cole Reschny (CAN)	2	0	4	4
Theo Stockselius (SWE)	5	2	1	3
Jack Hextall (USA)	5	0	1	1
Carson Carels (CAN)	2	0	0	0
Chase Harrington (CAN)	2	0	0	0
Mace’o Phillips (USA)	1	0	0	0
Cullen Potter (USA)	0	0	0	0

Wyttenbach led the group with eight points in four games, and he did it while sitting out three of the seven American games. Reschny’s four points in two is the best rate anyone from Calgary’s system managed. Those two are the reason this projection has a second line.

The rest of the table is a reminder of what a summer showcase is. It is a tryout camp for a December tournament, not a Flames development camp, and half the group barely got on the ice. Nobody earns an NHL job in Windsor. But it was the only week all eight were on the same sheet, and it is the last look anyone gets before they scatter to five different leagues.

The Flames on opening night

	Left	Centre	Right
1	Gridin	Frost	Coronato
2	Huberdeau	Reschny	Wyttenbach
3	Sharangovich	Zary	Potter
4	Farabee	Backlund	Pospisil
D1	Bahl	Parekh
D2	Carels	Nemec
D3	Middleton	Whitecloud
G	Wolf	Cooley

Bolded names were at the Showcase.

The first line is already a real line. Ryan Huska put Matvei Gridin, Morgan Frost and Matt Coronato together for the last 10 games of 2025-26 and they played just under 78 minutes at five-on-five with results. Frost is a 2027 free agent, but he is a 43-point centre at the position Calgary is thinnest at, on a team that will have money. Nobody lets that walk to save $4.4 million.

Coronato is the one who was locked down early. Conroy, when the seven-year extension was signed in the spring of 2025, framed it exactly the way the club has framed everything since:

Calgary Flames: Craig Conroy and Matt Coronato on Coronato's seven-year extension

Reschny and Wyttenbach are the second line, and Windsor is the argument. Reschny went 18th overall in 2025, put up 35 points in 36 games as a North Dakota freshman, and wore the C for Canada in the finale, his second straight game as captain. Wyttenbach led NCAA freshmen with 59 points in 40 games at Quinnipiac, then led every Flames prospect at the Showcase. His two goals in the last game are the ones that beat Canada: he tied it 26 seconds after Canada took its only lead, then scored the power-play goal that put the United States ahead for good. Six unanswered American goals followed. Huberdeau is the veteran on that line, not the reason for it.

There is one wrinkle in projecting them onto the same line. They spent the finale on opposite benches, and at one point they got physical with each other and killed their own team’s play. Something to sort out by 2027.

Wyttenbach, for his part, has been saying the quiet part out loud all summer:

Calgary Flames: Ethan Wyttenbach on building himself into an NHL player after his freshman season at Quinnipiac

Potter is the third-line bet, and health is doing all of the work. He was in Windsor for the full week and never took the ice, absent from all seven American lineups while he finishes his recovery from an injury sustained in January. That is the softest projection on either sheet, and it is not close. A player who has not played since the winter is being slotted into an NHL third line two seasons out on the strength of where he was drafted.

Carels is the open blue-line spot, and his Showcase line is a blank. Two games, no points, one holding penalty. That is a fairly ordinary week for an 18-year-old defenceman at his first international camp, and it is not the reason he is here. Sixth overall in June, North Dakota this season, and Ray Edwards, Calgary’s director of player development, on him: “The hockey IQ is off the charts, the competitiveness.” Conroy has talked about getting him into the lineup once his college season ends. Defencemen are projected off what they do without the puck, which is exactly what a summer box score does not record.

The crease is the boring part, and that is the point. Wolf is signed through 2032-33. Devin Cooley signed a two-year extension on December 30, 2025 that covers 2026-27 and 2027-28 at $1.35 million, so he is under contract for opening night too and does not reach free agency until 2028. Calgary is the rare team that already knows both of its goaltenders two summers out. A signed backup is not the same as a guaranteed one, and Kirill Zarubin is on an entry-level deal behind him, but nothing has to happen here for this square to be filled.

The Wranglers on opening night

The other four are not cuts. They are the next wave, and in this organization the next wave plays at the Saddledome’s replacement tenant down the road.

	Left	Centre	Right
1	Suniev	Hextall	Stockselius
2	Basha	Curran	Harrington
D1	Phillips	Brzustewicz
D2	Wiebe	Mews

Stockselius is the closest to the NHL of the four, and he was the only Flames prospect who dressed for all five of his country’s games. Three points, including two against Canada on the night Sweden won 5-3, one of them an empty-netter to seal it. He is a legitimate argument to dress over Potter on the Flames, and other projections have him doing exactly that. Call it a coin flip.

The reason he is ahead of the college group is contractual, not scouting. He signed his three-year entry-level deal in the spring:

Calgary Flames: Theo Stockselius signs a three-year entry-level contract

That deal runs through 2029, which means he will have a full professional season behind him before Reschny, Wyttenbach or Potter have played a single one.

Hextall centres the top line. Thirtieth overall in June, Michigan State this fall, and the projection assumes he signs after his freshman year rather than staying two. He dressed five times in Windsor and finished with a single power-play assist, which is a thin week, though he was setting up chances that did not go in.

Harrington is the one who gets there on a technicality, and he is the one to watch anyway. Junior graduates cannot jump to the AHL until they turn 20. He was born October 30, 2007, which means he turns 20 three weeks into the 2027-28 season. He clears by a month.

He is also the most Calgary player on either sheet. Thirty-sixth overall in June, 28 goals and 57 points in 61 games with Spokane last season, and 105 penalty minutes, which led the club. He was named the Chiefs’ co-player of the year. Asked about his own game after the draft, he did not reach for anything fancy: “I bring grit, I bring physicality, I bring compete. I can put pucks in the net.”

There is a small coincidence worth keeping. Harrington grew up in Prince George. Carels spent his junior career playing for it. Two of Calgary’s 2026 picks, one small B.C. city, arriving from opposite directions.

Phillips is the fourth, a 2025 third-rounder with Medicine Hat, and he clears the same age threshold comfortably. He is also the one name here the Showcase argues against: he dressed once in seven American games and sat the other six, with no public explanation for it. One camp is not a verdict on a defenceman, but it is not nothing either, and it is the weakest supporting evidence on this sheet.

The building they walk into

Everything above is pointed at one night, and that night is going to be strange in a way Calgary has not experienced in forty-four years: a brand new building opening with a substantially new team inside it.

Scotia Place broke ground on July 22, 2024 and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2027, ahead of the 2027-28 season. That is a little over three years of construction. It will hold 18,400 for hockey, which is slightly smaller than the Saddledome’s 19,289, and expand to roughly 20,000 for concerts. The general contractor is CANA, working with Mortenson, and CANA is the same Calgary firm that built the Saddledome in 1983, handled the 1995 renovations, and ran the 69-day restoration after the 2013 flood. The same company put up both buildings, forty years apart.

The money depends entirely on where you draw the line, so it is worth being specific rather than picking the number that sounds best. The arena alone is about $800 million. The full Event Centre Block, which adds a community rink, a parkade and the indoor and outdoor plazas, is $926.4 million. The whole project including district infrastructure, land and site remediation is $1.223 billion. Calgary Sports and Entertainment pays the City $17 million a year on a 35-year lease.

For scale: the Saddledome cost $97.7 million to build in 1983.

The rosters above are the other half of that turnover. Of the players who dressed for Calgary on opening night of the farewell season, a good number will not be in the building when the new one opens. Weegar, Kadri and Coleman are already gone. Strome and Frost and Klapka reach the end of their deals along the way. The team that skates out first at Scotia Place will have four or five players in it who were at a summer showcase in Windsor in 2026, which is not a coincidence so much as a plan.

The assumption, stated once

Three of these placements require a prospect to sign after two college seasons rather than three, and one requires signing after a single season. That is the stretch in this exercise, and it is a real one. College players hold that leverage and plenty of them use it.

What is not a stretch is the shape. Fifteen players are signed. The room was cleared on purpose: Weegar to Utah in March, Kadri back to Colorado two days later with Calgary retaining 20 percent, Blake Coleman to Minnesota in July. Conroy will spend some of that on players nobody has projected here.

Other versions of this roster are circulating and they disagree on nearly everything except the top two defence pairs. Bahl with Parekh, Carels with Nemec. When independent projections converge, that is usually the part that holds.

The Saddledome gets one more year, and Riley has the farewell covered. This is the other side of that door.

Worth watching now: whether Reschny and Carels both finish their college seasons in Calgary next spring and turn pro as this projection assumes. That is the tell for how much of this turns out to be real.