Flames’ Trade for Simon Nemec Is Worth the Risk

All was quiet surrounding the Stampede City leading up to the 2026 NHL Entry Draft, until days before, when Calgary Flames general manager (GM) Craig Conroy came out of left field and completed a deal with the new general manager of the New Jersey Devils, Sunny Mehta.

The trade sent two first-round picks, one in 2027, one in 2028, both being top-10 protected but projected to be late-round picks, with the original owners being the Vegas Golden Knights and the Colorado Avalanche. The Flames also sent a second-round pick in this year’s draft, originally owned by the New York Rangers, and 2023 second-round pick Etienne Morin to the Devils in exchange for Simon Nemec and Maxim Tsyplakov.

It’s a somewhat shocking move, considering that a few days ago, on the Barn Burner Podcast, GM Conroy said, “he was going to let the team decide” when it was time to add players.

However, there are certainly reasons to be positive, depending on your appetite or preference for different types of risk. Let’s discuss.

The Flames “Overpaid”

You’re already seeing it all over the place online, people using the F-word… saying the Flames were fleeced. Maybe that’s a fair baseline reaction when you see two first-round picks leaving the cupboards in return for a still semi-unproven young defenseman and a forward struggling to find his way in the NHL.

If this is your opinion, you could very well be right… I mean, MacKenzie Weegar only fetched three second-round picks when dealt to the Utah Mammoth, and Nemec isn’t close to the calibre of Weegar yet, so there is no denying this is a steep price to pay.

However, in deals like this, many people overvalue what first-round picks are actually worth, especially late first-rounders. Luckily, here at The Hockey Writers, we have an article detailing the success rates of NHL draft picks, which shows that fewer than 31% of the bottom-five picks in the first round of the NHL draft play 300 games, and fewer than 13% of those picks ever reach 300 career points.

With the Avalanche and Golden Knights expected to continue being powerhouses in the NHL over the next two seasons, I think it’s more than fair to set the expectation that these picks are likely very late first-rounders.

Adding on to the inherent lottery nature of the draft, players selected in this range are not put into the team’s short-term plans. Late first-round picks still typically need multiple seasons to develop before pushing for an NHL roster spot. If the Flames are still thinking they want to contend for a playoff spot in the season their new arena opens, prospects, outside of a select few, in the 2027 and 2028 drafts will not help with that.

Flames Still Taking Big Risk

While I’m not totally against the price Conroy paid, there is a significant amount of risk in this trade. To keep the example close to home, even though the players are at vastly different stages in their careers, Weegar is viewed as a bona fide top-four defenceman, regardless of who you would have asked.

That is not the case with Nemec. Opinions on social media have ranged from calling him the worst defenseman in the NHL last season to suggesting he has the potential to be a superstar.

Neither of these radical opinions is anywhere near the most likely reality, which lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum and could teeter in either direction over the next couple of seasons.

Right now, Nemec is a 22-year-old with 155 NHL games over three seasons. In his rookie season with the Devils, he showed plenty of promise offensively, scoring three goals and totalling 19 points. In 2024-25, he fell out of the Devils’ rotation on the blue line, with them having too many options to utilize. Now this season, he found his way back into the lineup consistently and posted a career high of 11 goals and 26 points in 68 games.

Not eye-popping numbers, but considering almost all of that damage was done at even strength, his 24 is quite impressive, even more so when you consider Dougie Hamilton and Vince Dunn, two guys viewed as established top-pair defensemen, who both finished the season with the same amount of points at even strength.

Overall, Hamilton finished with 39 points, and Dunn finished with 44. Comparing that to Nemec’s 26, the biggest difference was that Hamilton played 80 more minutes on the power play, and Dunn played 140 more minutes than the new Flames’ blueliner on the man advantage.

The offensive potential is certainly still there to become a high-end producer from that point, but the risk with Nemec comes more in the defensive zone. In 2025-26, he finished in the bottom three percent for D-Zone Retrievals, bottom four percent for Retrieval Success and bottom seven percent in Zone Exits.

However, he ranked among the top defenders in the league in Entry Denial Rate and Possession Entry Prevention, so he has shown good ability to defend the rush, even if some of this has come from players dumping the puck past him to take advantage of his poor retrieval skills.

A Risk Worth Taking

There are elements to Nemec’s game that need a lot of work, but at the same time, he has shown flashes of ability with the puck that a select few defensemen in the NHL have, and the fit in Calgary could be perfect.

Specifically, a pairing of him and Kevin Bahl. Nemec is a roamer who loves to look for chances to jump the play and create offence, while Bahl is a black hole offensively but loves to be physical and retrieve pucks in his own zone. On paper, each of these two should cover up the other’s weaknesses.

However, both of these guys need to make strides in their consistency if they’re going to get top minutes and play against top competition. The price was high, but considering how few late first-round picks become productive NHLers, it was worth paying to get 22-year-old Nemec, who may still have plenty of room to grow before hitting his ceiling.

It’s a hard trade to judge with how much uncertainty there is on both sides, but at least on the Flames side, they’ll likely get an answer this season, rather than having to wait multiple years to see what these draft picks turn into.