From the start, the Calgary Flames and Jonathan Huberdeau were a match made in heaven.
All Huberdeau wanted was for a team to show him some respect. The Flames just needed one star to love them back.
Flames general manager Brad Treliving didn’t need to look further than his recycling bin to find a suitable template for the contract he signed his newly acquired star winger on Thursday evening.
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Eight years with a top hit of $10.5 million. Sound familiar? It should be: Calgary offered former franchise cornerback Johnny Gaudreau the exact same deal.
You won’t find many players in the National Hockey League who produce like Huberdeau and Gaudreau. Both ends scored exactly 115 points last season, good enough to tie for second in the Art Ross Trophy race.
The Flames lost Gaudreau for absolutely nothing when he decided to sign a seven-year deal with the Columbus Blue Jackets in unrestricted free agency. And faced with the possibility of losing both Gaudreau and disgruntled 100-point scorer Matthew Tkachuk, Treliving found himself having to pull a rabbit out of the hat with his back propped up against a 50th-floor window.
Well, you can forget about all the rabbits. In one of the toughest trades an NHL executive has made in years, the Boston Pizza heir sent Tkachuk to Florida for a massive package centered around Huberdeau, as if to convince a Gaudreau facsimile that the sport has to offer.
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MacKenzie Weegar, Cole Schwindt and Florida’s 2025 first-round draft pick completed the impressive haul the Flames received for Tkachuk, who immediately signed an eight-year contract with the Panthers.
At the time, the deal resonated differently on both sides. Florida received a vital building block to pair with 2021 Frank J. Selke Trophy winner Aleksander Barkov for the foreseeable future; Calgary added two players signed for just the 2022-23 season that would at least help keep the competitive window open a little longer.
Treliving’s work was far from over, however. There was no way the GM was going into the 2022-23 season with two star players in contract limbo after a year of asking the same questions about Gaudreau and Tkachuk until they both left.
The Flames had to sign Huberdeau this summer. The only alternative would have been to change it back, and that just wasn’t going to fly.
Gaudreau, Tkachuk and Huberdeau are the only players in recent memory to switch teams immediately after scoring 100 points in a season. Can you imagine the reaction if all three ended up leaving the Flames in the same summer?
The Flames got what they wanted. So did the player, who would have taken a huge risk by not signing as much as possible immediately after his best 115-point season.
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Allan Walsh, Huberdeau’s agent, currently represents more than two dozen active NHL clients. Entering this summer, none earned more than $7 million per season. Now, Walsh is acting on behalf of the ninth highest paid player in the league. Talk about having an incentive to sign…
Are the Flames over? Kindness, no. Weegar needs a new deal, as does promising young center Adam Ruzicka. NHL team over-defense needs to be addressed. Treliving could stand to add another forward or two.
The items on the agenda will be dealt with in due course. For now, the days of the Flames’ on-ice leaders perpetually playing with one foot out the door are over. The Huberdeau era has officially begun, and the rest of the pieces can now fall into place.
If all else fails, Jona-10 got its Huber mass.
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