The Athletic’s mock expansion draft didn’t take long to find a target in Calgary, and it landed on the one goalie who slid into Dustin Wolf’s backup role last season: Devin Cooley.
With the Flames still in the thick of a rebuild and plenty of their roster built around players under 25, the projected 33rd team passed on Calgary’s younger pieces and instead took Cooley. It’s a notable nod to how the depth chart could shake out in 2026-27, even if the club’s bigger-picture core remains intact in the exercise.
Cooley, 29, put together a 10-10-6 record in 31 games last season, along with a 2.69 GAA and .909 SV%. His NHL path has been a long one. In 2023-24, he made his debut with the San Jose Sharks and went 2-3-1 in six games.
Before he settled into a full-time backup job in Calgary, Cooley spent parts of five seasons in the AHL. Across 112 games there, he went 53-41-13 with a .902 SV% and a 3.07 GAA. His pro resume also includes time in the USHL, the ECHL, and a recent stint with Team USA at the World Championships.
Calgary rewarded that climb on Dec. 30, 2025, when general manager Craig Conroy signed Cooley to an extension that runs two more years at $2.7 million, the biggest deal of his career.
If the fictional expansion club did end up taking him, Cooley would join a crowded goalie group in The Athletic’s mock draft. The writers selected five netminders: Filip Gustavsson from Minnesota, Sebastian Cossa from Utah, Leevi Merilainen from Ottawa, Artur Akhyuamov from Toronto, and Cooley.
The Flames have already been through this kind of protection exercise twice before. When Seattle entered the league in 2021, Calgary’s protected list featured names like Backlund, Dube, Gaudreau, Lindholm, Mangiapane, Monahan, Tkachuk, Andersson, Hanifin, Tanev and Markström. Seattle ultimately chose Mark Giordano, who became the franchise’s first captain.
Back in the 2017 Vegas expansion draft, the Flames’ protected group again included Backlund, Gaudreau and Monahan, while also listing Bennett, Ferland, Frolik, Lazar, Brodie, Hamilton, Smith and Giordano. The Golden Knights took Deryk Engelland, and he helped them reach the Stanley Cup Final in June 2018.
There’s no official expansion draft on the calendar right now, but the speculation isn’t going anywhere. For Calgary, the timing would be especially interesting because of the youth movement underway and the no-movement clauses the team may have to navigate with several of its core players. Whoever the Flames leave exposed could be someone they’ve developed from the draft all the way to the NHL.
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