“It’s never that simple.”
Craig Conroy knows all too well that the Calgary Flames need young centres.
As the team’s GM, he also knows that selecting one in the draft is often the most straightforward way of acquiring them.
And yet, anyone suggesting that the Flames’ strategy when they’re called upon to make the No. 18 or 32 picks in the first round of Friday night’s NHL Draft will be to simply take the best centre available is out to lunch.
It’s never that simple.
“You have players and you rank them all the way from your top guy all the way down. You wouldn’t just take a player for a position if you have another player so highly rated ahead,” Conroy explained. “As much as you might want a position, but if you have a player that you feel is a top-six forward, let’s say, and when you get there, you just think he has such a higher ceiling than maybe a position you need, I think you’re always going to take the higher ceiling.
“You do hope it lines up with what you need, and then it’s a perfect fit, but that’s not always the case.”
None of that is to say that the Flames won’t take a centre if one is available. In our under-25 power rankings of centres in the prospect pipeline, we had Connor Zary ranked No. 1 and he mostly has played on the wing through the first two seasons of his NHL career.
It’s just not an area where the Flames have much young depth and, at the NHL level, Nazem Kadri is 34 years old and Mikael Backlund is 36, so the team is going to need younger replacements at some point in the relatively near future.
In a year where most mock drafts have a disproportionate number of centres going in the first-round, this might be the year to pick one — or two.
But the Flames are adamant that if there is a player they think has significantly more upside than the best centre available on Friday night, they’re going to go with the guy they’ve got ranked higher.
Flames fans may have zeroed in on the Seattle Thunderbirds’ Braeden Cootes or the Victoria Royals’ Cole Reschny as their star centre of the future, but if there’s a blueliner who could form a dynamic pairing with Zayne Parekh for years to come, that will hold a lot of appeal to the Flames, too.
It might be a cliche, but the Flames really are planning on taking the best player who happens to be available.
“It’s kind of not even how we’ve operated,” Flames director of amateur scouting Tod Button said when asked about taking the best centre available. “We’ve used the best-player mantra and there’s a lot of variables that go into that, but in the past we’ve watched other teams reach for centres and we’ve watched ourselves maybe do the same thing, positionally or for centres, and it’s really important that you learn from the past.
“Saying that, there are a bunch of good centres available and especially in the first round. It’s one of those things where if we do take a centre it’s ‘Oh, they took a centre. They were lying.’
“But the mantra is still ‘Best Player Available’ when we pick where we pick.”
If you’re reading this and feeling skeptical about whether the Flames would actually pass on a young centre in the draft when it’s such a position-of-need, well, recent history suggests they aren’t lying.
It’s not like they’ve all-of-a-sudden been put in a position where they needed or wanted centres.
The same was true at last year’s draft and they wound up taking Parekh and winger Matvei Gridin with their two first-round picks.
People were saying the same thing about their centre depth in 2023 and they took a winger in Sam Honzek with their first-round pick and another blueliner, Etienne Morin, in the second.
The simple truth is that the Flames aren’t going to pass on a player they think has first-line or top-pairing potential just to take a guy with a lower ceiling who happens to play centre.
Ideally, the best player available lines up with your needs. If he doesn’t, though, that doesn’t mean you don’t take him.
“There are good centres, we might wind up taking a centre,” Button explained. “We could take two centres, but that doesn’t mean it was pre-determined. It’s just how our list falls. The flip side of that is there are a lot of good centres.
“A few years ago, (former GM Brad Treliving) and I, when we drafted Matt Coronato, it was a point where we needed a right wing, a right-shot with skill. The need and the availability of the player intersected perfectly with our draft spot.
“We want to get the best player available at our spot and go from there. If, at some point, we have a bunch of defencemen that are highly-rated, maybe that gets us a position of need through a trade.”
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