Walker Duehr has the opportunity to bounce back.
By his own admission, the 2023-24 season didn’t go the way the Calgary Flames winger would have liked. Expectations were high coming into the year, but he struggled to find his game and didn’t make quite the impact he was hoping for.
Duehr played in 40 games scoring twice and adding five assists but finding himself out of the lineup on game nights more often than anyone could have anticipated before the season started.
Now, though, he’s getting a fresh start.
“It’s no secret that it didn’t go the way I wanted, especially coming off the way I ended-off the season prior,” Duehr said Saturday at the Saddledome. “I wasn’t able to carry that momentum in, but I’m looking to put that in the rearview and getting back to myself and playing with confidence and just kind of being the pain in the backside to play against on a nightly basis.”
Flames fans have seen what Duehr can do when he’s at his best. In 2022-23, Duehr joined the team mid-season after a strong start with the Calgary Wranglers and quickly made himself an every-night player under then-head coach Darryl Sutter.
Duehr scored seven goals and added four assists in a fourth-line role and excelled at going into corners and retrieving pucks.
It just didn’t carry over into last season. Duehr saw his ice-time drop – from 10:12 minutes-per-game to 8:07 – and scored only twice while adding five assists.
But the Flames haven’t given up on him. The message in exit-meetings was straightforward: Go have a good summer getting ready for next season.
Duehr has mostly been skating on a line with Kevin Rooney and Ryan Lomberg at camp, suggesting that a role on the fourth-line wing is there for him to claim as his own.
“He’s fast,” Lomberg said about Duehr. “I thought I was fast but I’m kind of chasing him out there. He’s fast.”
That speed is a big part of what differentiates Duehr. He gets into the corners fast and makes life difficult for defencemen, and at 6-foot-2 and 210 lbs. he can win puck-battles along the boards, too.
If he can get back to playing with the speed and confidence he showed two seasons ago, Duehr could be a very useful player for the Flames this season.
“The one thing for Walk is we know how fast he skates, he’s got a rocket of a shot and he’s a big body,” said Flames head coach Ryan Huska. “Those are all things we want in our lineup, so for him, it’s staying true to his identity, more or less being an up-and-down wing guy, does a great job of pressuring the defence into mistakes, and using his speed to get in on forechecks and creating problems for his linemates.
“He has to be a responsible player for us, that’s really what we’re looking for out of him and we want to see him do it consistently shift-after-shift-after-shift but also game-to-game.”
It’s still too early in training camp to know exactly how the Flames’ lines are going to shake-out come the start of the regular season. They’ll play their first pre-season game on Sunday evening against the Kraken in Seattle, and it’s quite possible that most – or many, at least – of the presumed NHLers won’t be making the trip.
Early indications are that Duehr is seen as being part of the plan for 2024-25, though, and are confident he’ll bounce back.
“I had a long off-season and I wanted to focus on getting quicker and stronger,” Duehr said. “Then, it was just getting back to my basic skills on the ice and just honestly being confident with that, holding onto pucks and being good on the net and below the dots.”