Connor Zary didn’t say much.
In these sorts of meetings, the players rarely do.
“It was his body language … ” recalled Flames head coach Ryan Huska.
“You could tell he was pissed off,” echoed general manager Craig Conroy, reminding that he has been on both sides of these discussions. “I’ve sat in that chair, too, as a young player and I was feeling pissed off, the same exact thing. I had that for three years, so I understand what he was feeling.
“He was very respectful through the whole thing, but he was just staring at us and not saying much. But what he did say was, ‘Fine, what do I have to do to come back?’ That was it.”
Zary’s reaction — both in the moment and, ultimately, in the minors — is a tale told often around the Saddledome. It will likely be relayed again to the guys getting bad news before Monday’s league-wide roster deadline.
A year ago, Zary was among the Flames’ late-in-training-camps cuts, reassigned to the Wranglers rather than readying for his NHL debut. While it didn’t come as a huge shock on the outside, with the headline writers mostly focused on Dustin Wolf’s demotion that same day, this up-and-coming forward believed that he was capable of contributing at the top level and wasn’t hiding his frustration as Conroy and Huska tried to explain their decision.
Zary was recalled three-and-a-half weeks later and buried a goal on the third shift of his big-league career. Just turned 23, he is now a fixture in the Flames’ lineup and a major piece of the long-term plan.
“We told him, ‘Go down and be the best player there.’ And sure enough, he did that,” Conroy said. “And then he came back up and right from the beginning, he took off.”
“He was mad last year, Connor was, sitting in that office,” Huska added. “Connie and I, we laugh now, but he wasn’t happy. We asked him to find out who he was as a player, and he went down and I think he had 10 points in four games for the Wranglers, so he did what we asked him to do. A little bit of that fire is important. You shouldn’t be happy and you shouldn’t be good with it, but he is a good example of going down there and doing something about it.
“I’m pretty proud of him, because he went down and did the right thing. He didn’t sulk. He didn’t pout. He made sure he found out who he was, and he’s here now because of that.”
There’s a lesson there, no doubt.
For the guys who have already been assigned to the Wranglers, with blue-liners Hunter Brzustewicz and Artem Grushnikov and centre Sam Morton among those knocking at the door.
And for the guys who will head to the farm club Monday. The Flames, like every other team in the NHL, need to finalize a 23-man opening roster by 3 p.m. MT.
A hat-trick of young forwards — Matt Coronato, Jakob Pelletier and Cole Schwindt — are expected to be among Calgary’s last cuts. (Pelletier and Schwindt were both on waivers Sunday, so they could instead be claimed by another organization.)
“You have a choice,” Huska stressed. “If you don’t make this team, you can go down and kick stones for two or three weeks, and other people are going to pass you by and then your opportunity that you were so close to here is going to be so much further away. Or you can go down and be the hardest-working, best player down there so when there is an issue, you’re the first guy to come back up. It’s always their choice. And that’s typically what we’d like them to understand when they go down.
“Just human nature, sometimes guys have a hard time with it and they don’t handle it the right way and they find themselves spinning their wheels for a while, until they’re like, ‘OK, I gotta snap out of it.’ But sometimes when you’ve had competition like we’ve had, it’s a little too late because someone else has now jumped past you when that first call does come.”
Zary was, going back to last October, the Flames’ first call. The left-winger, to steal Conroy’s phrasing, “made a statement” by opening the 2023-24 campaign with a goal and nine assists in six minor-league outings. (During that brief stint with the Wranglers, he was skating on the same line as Martin Pospisil, who’d soon join him in ‘The Show.’)
Zary, who should be working alongside Mikael Backlund and Blake Coleman in Wednesday’s season-opener against the Canucks in Vancouver, grins when a reporter mentions that now-infamous meeting with Conroy and Huska a year ago.
“Every time you go into one of those, you know what’s happening, so it’s a pretty tough day and you’re pretty upset,” Zary said. “Whether you think you played good or think you played bad or whatever, you’re going to be upset to not be sticking around. Definitely, I told them how I felt and I obviously showed it. I knew I wanted to get better and I knew where I wanted to be at, and they understood that.”
His smile widens.
“It all worked out in the end.”
It sure did, and that’s a story that other training camp cuts can learn from.