The Farm Team Is 2-0. The Flames Are 0-2.
On the night the Flames fell to 0-2 in Vancouver, their farm team finished a weekend sweep at the Saddledome, and a rookie defenceman did a bit of everything.
Saddledome — The Calgary Wranglers beat the Abbotsford Canucks 4-2 on Saturday to finish their opening weekend 2-0, and later that night the Flames lost 4-1 in Vancouver to fall to 0-2.
The Wranglers won it in the third. They went in tied 1-1 and outshot 26-15 through two periods, then scored three times on 17 shots. Luke Philp beat Ty Young at 1:06, eleven seconds after Calgary finished killing a delay-of-game minor to Abram Wiebe. Axel Hurtig scored the winner at 14:43, three seconds after a kneeing penalty to Jimmy Schuldt ran out, with Aydar Suniev and Mike Benning on the assists. Braeden Cootes cut it to 3-2 at 16:16, and Hunter Brzustewicz put the puck in an empty net at 19:37. Attendance was 2,504.
The rookie
Hurtig is a defenceman. He made his AHL debut on Friday, and on Saturday he scored his first two goals in the league.
The first one tied the game at 6:09 of the second period, from Alex Nylander and William Strömgren, after Ty Mueller had put Abbotsford ahead in the first. Six and a half minutes later he was in the middle of the only real flare-up of the weekend.
At 12:46 of the second, the bodies piled up beside the Calgary net, with Kirill Zarubin out at the faceoff circle. Hurtig lost his helmet. A linesman got between him and an Abbotsford player, and then two officials had hold of him. Vilmer Alriksson was tied up against the boards a few feet away. Philp and Tyson Gross were in there too. There was no fight. The sheet gave Hurtig and Alriksson matching roughing minors, the second pair of coincidental roughing calls in the period after William Strömgren and Kole Lind went off together at 9:05.
Then he scored the winner. A first AHL goal, a scrum and a game-winner in one afternoon is a full weekend for most people, and he had already played Friday.
Zarubin made 31 saves on 33 shots in his first AHL game and won it. Arsenii Sergeev had won the opener. Over the two games the Wranglers were outshot 65-53 and outscored Abbotsford 8-4, killed all five Abbotsford power plays and went 0 for 5 on their own.
Hurtig was not the only rookie on the Calgary blue line. Abram Wiebe, an alternate captain at North Dakota who has played four games for the Flames, dressed for both: plus-2 with three shots on Friday, two more shots on Saturday. His delay-of-game penalty late in the second was the one Calgary killed eleven seconds before Philp scored.
The ones who did not play
Suniev played both games. His assist on the winner was his first point of the season. It is not his first in Calgary: he played 57 games for the Wranglers last season and scored 16 goals.
Alex Gallant did not dress either day, and Derek Forbort, the veteran defenceman who signed a professional tryout on Thursday, did not dress either. Nobody has said why. The editor of this site, at the glass for warmup on Saturday, did not see Gallant on the ice.
The way in
Saturday was the first time this site has covered a game with a media credential.
The editor came in through the TELUS Club entrance and picked up the card with photo ID, then walked the concourse to get a feel for the day. The way to the press area turned out to be an unmarked door with someone guarding it, between the corporate suites and the stairwell to the concourse. Past it, stairs go down. At the bottom, players were running wind sprints.
To the left is the Ed Whalen Media Lounge: framed photographs, paper packets of stats, muffins, drinks in a fridge, and an automated espresso machine that goes by R2D2. The editor had a cappuccino, went up for warmup, tried three different spots with a camera new to the editor, came back down to read the paperwork, said hello to Darryl Sutter on the way past, and had a second cappuccino.
By puck drop the editor was up on the press level. The door there was open and unguarded, and the editor’s read was that the crowd was too small to need a guard on it. There were no fans on the press level.
On opening night two days earlier the editor sat in PL5 with a Cinnamalt, the drink that used to be called a chocolate malt. Late in Saturday’s second period the editor went looking for another one. The press level stands were closed. So was most of the concourse, apart from a chicken place. There was no Cinnamalt.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver
The Flames led at Rogers Arena from late in the first period until early in the third. Matt Coronato scored on the power play at 14:51 of the first, from Zayne Parekh and Joel Farabee, and it was 1-0 into the third.
Vancouver then scored four in a little under sixteen minutes. Liam Ohgren tied it 1:28 in, defenceman Elias Pettersson put the Canucks ahead at 9:04, Drew O’Connor made it 3-1 at 16:33 and Aatu Räty hit the empty net 43 seconds later. Devin Cooley stopped 22 of 25. Vancouver outshot Calgary 26-24.
Adam Klapka fought Luke Schenn 2:55 into the game and finished with 25 penalty minutes, including two ten-minute misconducts. Brennan Othmann, scratched for the home opener, played his first game of the season: 10:30, and three hits.
So the farm team is unbeaten and the big club is winless, which after two games each means very little and is still the kind of thing people notice. The Flames are in Seattle on Sunday. The Wranglers are home to Bakersfield on Friday.
Next in Rinkside Dispatch → Connor Zary's First Night Back on the Farm Ended With a Goal Four days after the Flames waived him, Connor Zary played his first AHL game since 2023-24, scored off a Dryden Hunt pass and was named first star. 
