Calgary Flames and Philadelphia Flyers find mutual benefit in trade
Calgary Flames general manager Craig Conroy put the rationale behind his Thursday night trade perfectly:
"I definitely wanted to give the team something. They deserved it, and they’ve earned it. To give 'em a boost, a shot in the arm — whatever it is — we felt like these players could do that. 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. For right now, we really want to find guys that we can grow with (for) the long-term."
That reward: a trade for Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost, two youngish forwards who had fallen out of favor with the Philadelphia Flyers, in exchange for Andrei Kuzmenko, Jakob Pelletier, a 2025 second-round pick, and a seventh-round pick in 2028. It's a trade that gives the Flames' roster and fans a bit of hope that they can undergird their outsized success, and the Flyers an opportunity to fill some different needs.
As mentioned the other day, they were in a position where the team was having a lot of unexpected success this season, largely due to the fact that rookie goaltender Dustin Wolf has basically made himself a Calder frontrunner and maybe even edged into the MVP conversation. In short, Calgary ended last night eighth in the West by both points and points percentage and while their willingness/ability to move Kuzmenko, who had trade protection and probably made a little too much money to seem like realistic trade bait after a slow first half of the season, and Pelletier, who's just young and has some promise as an offensive contributor, shows just how eager they were to get a deal done. That's leaving aside the idea of a rebuilding team giving up a second-round pick.
But again, Farabee and Frost were seemingly just not really "John Tortorella guys," but they are certainly capital-N Names — two first-round picks that have scored 40-plus points in the past couple years, now having down seasons in large part because their ice time and usage is on the decline. The idea that the Flames might be able to wring a little extra out of them in their age-25 and 24 seasons, respectively, makes a lot of sense, and in theory makes a team that is currently 28th in goals per game a bit more dangerous. They don't have to score that much more per night to work their way into the 16-20 range, but they'll need Farabee and Frost to step up and reach that 50-point pace Farabee showed just last season. The good news is they could at least create some different looks for the top power-play unit — the Flames are middling at 21 percent, 17th in the league — which has been running a Huberdeau/Kadri/Coronato/Sharangovich unit for the last little while without a ton of success (19 percent in the last 15 games).
Basically, the Flames are buying low on both guys, which is what GMs should aim to do, as long as they believe those guys have a higher ceiling than they've shown. The underlying numbers certainly suggest that; the Flyers have been badly outscored with Farabee and Frost on the ice, but both have on-ice save percentages in the .880s at 5-on-5 despite very good underlying numbers (52 and 55 percent of the expected goals, respectively). There's reason to believe the Flames could get more out of them even in the same kind of limited roles they played in Philadelphia.
To get those two forwards, Calgary gave up on Kuzmenko, who has never been a particularly fleet-footed player who is producing at by far the lowest rate of his NHL career: only four goals so far, down from 39 in 2022-23 and 22 last season. He has just 39 shots on goal in 37 games this season. Kuzmenko is a pending UFA, and the Flyers actually added salary to bring him in, but the thinking is clearly more to do with intangibles than what Kuzmenko brings to the lineup. He played in Russia with Matvei Michkov, whose relationship with Tortorella doesn't seem to be going very well. If Kuzmenko — not exactly the kind of player Tortorella tends to enjoy using in significant roles — can at least act as a sort of intermediary/mentor to Michkov, even just for the rest of this season, that would be a positive.
And with Pelletier, who has been okay but not overwhelmingly effective in his third partial season of NHL hockey, they are selling a bit high. He's got 4-7—11 in 24 games while playing 12ish minutes a night (respectable production), but his 5-on-5 goals-for percentage is almost 25 points higher than his expected-goals share (74.2 percent versus 49.9 percent). For some reason, it's hard to foresee him getting a .954 on-ice save percentage in Philly.
So this makes sense for both teams. If all the Flames gave up to even moderately upgrade their roster both now and in the future was give up two guys they didn't see a future with, one of second-round picks they had this year, and a seventh further down the road, that's a really reasonable price to pay without derailing the broader "retool" of their organization. And the Flyers get a guy who helps with a future cornerstone of their team, a younger player who might be able to grow into a bigger role, and a couple of picks that continue the rebuild strategy.
You don't see it often, but this is just a good ol' fashioned Hockey Trade.
