Who Answers the Bell? The Wranglers Lost 395 Penalty Minutes, and Alex Gallant Is 33.

The hardest job on the Calgary Wranglers belongs to a 33-year-old on a one-year AHL contract, and when the season opens on October 2 there is nobody obvious standing behind him.

Alex Gallant took 179 penalty minutes in 42 games last season. That was fifth in the American Hockey League. He is back for a 12th AHL season and an eighth in the Flames system, with 427 games and 1,331 penalty minutes behind him. Five of the seven most penalized players on last season’s roster are gone. He is not one of them, and he is most of what is left of this team’s physical identity.

Five of the seven toughest are gone

Sort last season’s roster by penalty minutes. The problem shows up fast.

	Player	GP	PIM	Where he is now
1	Alex Gallant	42	179	Back, AHL deal
2	Nick Cicek	70	119	Shanghai Dragons (KHL)
3	Lucas Ciona	47	81	Wilkes-Barre/Scranton
4	Martin Frk	66	70	Shanghai Dragons (KHL)
5	Dryden Hunt	52	64	Back, on an NHL deal
6	Clark Bishop	72	63	Syracuse Crunch
7	Turner Ottenbreit	57	62	Shanghai Dragons (KHL)

Five of those seven are gone. They took 395 penalty minutes with them.

Three signed at the same KHL club inside twelve days, which is the story we filed earlier this month. Ciona went to Wilkes-Barre and Bishop to Syracuse. That part is ordinary AHL free agency. The hole is the same size either way.

The letters went too. Calgary announced five of them last October. Bishop wore the C. Frk, Gallant, Cicek and Hunt wore A’s. Three of those five are on other rosters now.

Gallant

Gallant is not a ceremonial veteran. He is 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds. He has spent a career answering the bell against men who outweigh him, and he prepares for it like homework.

He told FlamesNation in May 2025 that he scouts the other bench before a heavy weekend. “I’ll watch to see how they’ve been doing or have done in the past and see little tactics they do or whatever. Anything to give me the upper hand.”

On his own status this summer, to the same outlet: “My body feels great and I really want to play again.”

He turns 34 in December.

The Wranglers announcing Alex Gallant's re-signing and Kent Anderson's AHL contract, May 2026

The blue line got emptied out

Nine defencemen played 25 games or more for the Wranglers last season. One is coming back.

Cicek and Ottenbreit signed in Shanghai. Artem Grushnikov signed with CSKA Moskva on July 13. Etienne Morin was traded to New Jersey on June 23. Gavin White signed in Abbotsford, Simon Mack in Slovakia. Jérémie Poirier did not leave this summer at all. Calgary traded him to Dallas on February 2 for White, and the Stars did not qualify him in June, so he is unsigned now, but he had been gone for months before any of this. Daniil Miromanov is also unsigned, reported as heading to SKA St. Petersburg since May but still listed as an unsigned free agent on the NHL’s own tracker. That leaves Hunter Brzustewicz, still on his entry-level deal.

So the Flames bought a blue line. Three defencemen on one-year, two-way contracts, all on July 1.

Jake Livingstone is 6-foot-4 and 214 pounds, a right shot, 17 points in 52 games for Charlotte. Michael Benning is 5-foot-9, also right-handed, 31 points in 57 AHL games plus 18 with Florida. Andreas Englund cost $900,000. He is 6-foot-4, has played 200 NHL games across five organizations, and carries 190 penalty minutes at that level against 20 points.

Nobody signs Englund for the 20 points.

Behind them it gets young. Axel Hurtig starts a three-year entry-level deal after captaining the Hitmen: 19 points, 46 penalty minutes and a plus-21 in 64 games. Abram Wiebe turned pro out of North Dakota. Kent Anderson signed an AHL deal at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds, a Calgary kid who came up through the Northstars and captained Denver to an NCAA title. Kyle Walker is back on an AHL contract.

Then August 5 brought two more, both on AHL deals out of the Bakersfield organization. Tyson Feist is a 6-foot-3, 207-pound right shot. Tyler Inamoto is a 6-foot-2 left shot. Neither is a scorer. Both spent most of last season in the ECHL, and both are the kind of signing a club makes when it has counted its defencemen and not liked the number.

The scoring, oddly, mostly stayed

The departure list reads worse than the roster is.

Frk led the Wranglers in goals with 30. He did not lead them in points. Dryden Hunt did, 63 in 52 games, and Hunt is signed through 2026-27.

Martin Frk scoring for the Wranglers, February 2026

Rory Kerins re-signed after 57 points in 56 games. So did William Strömgren (47) and Sam Morton (38). Matvei Gridin put up 30 points in 37 games at 19 and is back in the organization, though he may open the season in Calgary. Aydar Suniev gets a second AHL year.

Ben Jones returns to a building he knows, with 97 points in 143 Wranglers games between 2022 and 2024 and a season captaining Iowa behind him. Luke Philp comes home to the Flames system after a year in Sweden. Jonathan Castagna and Tyson Gross turned pro out of Cornell and St. Cloud State.

One name is unresolved. Brennan Othmann was tendered a qualifying offer on June 29 and has not signed.

Ryder Boulton is the one to circle. He signed an AHL deal out of Brantford, where he took 79 penalty minutes in 48 games last season. Before that he won two OHL championships and a Memorial Cup with London. He is 20 years old and 5-foot-10. That is Gallant’s résumé, read from the other end.

Will Dineen arrived on August 5 alongside the two defencemen, on an AHL deal out of Laval. He is 25, 6-foot-2 and 201 pounds, and he is Kevin Dineen’s son. FlamesNation, announcing the signing, said he “is known to put up some killer hits.” He had five points in 35 AHL games last season. Read that combination for what it is.

Who is not walking through that door

Carson Carels is committed to North Dakota. Cole Reschny returns to North Dakota for his sophomore season. Neither is an AHL option this year, and any Wranglers depth chart with them on it is wrong. Wiebe is the North Dakota man who actually helps this team, because he finished school and turned pro.

The bench, and the coach who isn’t on it

Brett Sutter enters his second season as head coach, promoted from assistant in June 2025. Bishop took the captaincy from him. That is how short the memory in that room now runs.

The Flames naming Brett Sutter head coach of the Wranglers, June 2025

Joe Cirella is not returning. John Dean came in as an assistant on July 8 after eight seasons running the OHL’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, where he went 247-178-49. David Liffiton stays on.

Sutter is the third head coach in the four seasons since Mitch Love.

Love ran the inaugural Wranglers for exactly one year. They went 51-17-3-1 in 2022-23, the best record in the AHL. They killed penalties at 85.1 percent, first in the league. He won the Pieri Award as the AHL’s coach of the year for the second straight season, the third man in league history to go back to back. Washington hired him as an assistant that June.

What happened after that is why we wrote about him earlier this month, and the short version belongs here. The NHL suspended Love for the whole of 2025-26 for “conduct detrimental to the league,” following an investigation into allegations about his personal conduct. Neither the league nor the Capitals has ever described that conduct. Love denies the allegations. No criminal charge has been laid, no arrest has been reported, and there is no record of a police investigation. He coaches the Shanghai Dragons now, which is the reason three Wranglers had a familiar bench waiting for them in July.

There is a line on the ice since he left, and it is worth reading carefully. Wranglers points by season: 106, then 79, then 81, then 61. Love’s 2022-23 team killed penalties at 85.1 percent, first in the league, per Washington’s own release when they hired him. FlamesNation’s season review put last year’s penalty kill at 75.8 percent, last in the league.

That is a real decline. It is not Love’s absence that caused it. The roster turned over four times, three men have coached the club, and the Flames spent those years rebuilding the organization above it. What his exit did to this team was narrower than a coaching loss, and stranger. It put a two-time coach of the year on a KHL bench in January. It gave three of Calgary’s own players somewhere to go in July.

What it means

That is the reporting. The rest is opinion.

The Wranglers did not lose their offence this summer. They lost their edge. Those are different problems on different clocks.

Scoring can be replaced by a 19-year-old having a good October. A room that stops being uncomfortable to visit cannot, and a club that just surrendered 269 goals, more than anyone else in the league, is a strange candidate to get easier to play against.

Calgary’s answer is Englund, a huge Swedish rookie, a 20-year-old out of Brantford, and a 33-year-old who still watches tape of other teams’ tough guys. August 5 added a winger signed for his hitting. It might hold. The only proven piece of it has been in the league twelve years.

Nobody in the organization has said what this is meant to be. No comment from Craig Conroy. None from Brad Pascall, who runs the Wranglers. The one statement of intent the club has issued sits on the schedule release, and it is marketing: “The Future Starts Here, and you have an opportunity to watch tomorrow’s NHL stars compete today during one final season at the Scotiabank Saddledome.”

Read it how you like. It does not mention winning.

What to watch: October 2, Abbotsford at the Saddledome, 7 p.m. A blue line with one returning regular on it, in the last season the Wranglers will ever open in that building.

Independent commentary. Not affiliated with the Calgary Flames, the Calgary Wranglers, or the NHL. Stats and transactions verified against AHL, club and league sources as of August 5, 2026. The NHL and the Washington Capitals have not publicly described the allegations against Mitch Love. Love denies the allegations. No criminal charge or arrest has been reported. Rosters move in August, and AHL training camps do not open until late September.