Over nearly a decade in Calgary, Johnny Gaudreau emerged as one of the most beloved players in Flames history.
And with Gaudreau’s family — and the Columbus Blue Jackets — in Calgary for Tuesday’s game for the first time since Johnny and his brother Matthew were senselessly killed by an alleged drunk driver in late August, it’s an appropriate time to look back on some of the incredible on-ice moments he had with the Flames organization.
Here are 10 times Gaudreau dazzled Calgary hockey fans during his spectacular tenure in the city:
First goal for the Flames
When: April 13, 2014
By the time Gaudreau played his first game with the Flames, Calgary hockey fans were already borderline obsessed with his potential.
Yes, he’d been a fourth-round draft pick and sure, he was undersized, but fans had been seeing what he’d been doing at Boston College where he’d won the Hobey Baker Award as the top player in U.S. college hockey. You couldn’t help but wonder if he might be the star to lead the Flames out of the post-Jarome Iginla era.
And in his first game at the end of the 2013-14 season, he delivered, scoring on his very first shot and sending fans into a frenzy.
It was a preview of things to come, and was a shot of excitement for a fanbase that was rightfully worried about what a long rebuild was going to feel like.
First hat-trick
When: Dec. 22, 2014
The 2014-15 season is rightfully recalled fondly by Flames fans. It was the year that the ‘Find-A-Way Flames’ surprised many in the hockey world by making the playoffs for the first time since 2009 and then knocked off the rival Vancouver Canucks in Round 1.
What’s sometimes forgotten, though, is how there was a moment in December when it felt like the season was spiralling in the wrong direction.
Then, on one magical night in Los Angeles, Gaudreau almost singlehandedly turned things around.
The Flames had lost eight in a row and were down 3-0 against the Kings when Gaudreau took over, scoring a hat-trick to send the game to overtime, where Mark Giordano won it.
The Flames wouldn’t look back. They cruised to third place in the Pacific Division and then eliminated the favoured Canucks in six games, exhilarating the Calgary fanbase along the way.
Tying it up against the Ducks
When: May 5, 2015
After beating the Canucks in the first round in 2015, the Flames were paired up with a Ducks squad that was basically a boogeyman team for them. The Flames had lost 20 straight games in Anaheim and the Ducks had home-ice advantage.
And while the Ducks did prove to be too much for the Flames and won the series in five games, the one win the young Flames did earn in Game 3 has gone down in franchise lore.
With just 19 seconds left and the Ducks up 3-2, Gaudreau calmly collected the puck and drifted into the slot, where he fired the puck past Frederik Anderson to send the game to overtime, where Mikael Backlund finished the job.
The Flames couldn’t beat the Ducks in the series, but they got the best of them that one night — largely because of Gaudreau’s heroics.
After a surprise season that caught the imagination of Calgary hockey fans, that one win set off a celebration along 17th Avenue the likes of which the city hadn’t seen in a decade.
Wins Lady Byng
When: June 21, 2017
Gaudreau was never a player who seemed to lose his cool on the ice or take stupid penalties. He was intense as a competitor, but that never seemed to extend into playing dirty or taking cheap shots.
After leading the Flames in points in 2016-17, with 61, Gaudreau was awarded the NHL’s Lady Byng Memorial Trophy at season’s end. The Lady Byng is awarded to the player “adjudged to have exhibited the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct combined with a high standard of playing ability.”
Gaudreau fit that definition to a tee, and it was appropriate to see him receive league-wide recognition.
Setting up Jagr’s last goal
When: Nov. 9, 2017
Jaromir Jagr’s time in Calgary didn’t last long and will most likely be treated like a footnote in his Hall of Fame career by most people, but it was still fun having a legend of the game skating in Flames colours.
And it’s a great piece of trivia that Gaudreau assisted on the last of Jagr’s incredible 766 NHL goals.
On a two-on-one with Jagr on his left, Gaudreau calmly fed the puck to the Czech winger for an easy finish into the back of the Detroit Red Wings net.
It was one of those plays where the second you saw that Gaudreau had the puck on his stick, you knew the end result. There are a lot of goals on this list, but his playmaking and eye for finding his teammates in dangerous positions were unrivalled.
And it stuck with Jagr, too. He posted a beautiful tribute to Gaudreau on Instagram in early September with a clip of the goal.
The purple Gatorade celebration
When: All of 2018-19
The 2018-19 season is where it felt like the Flames’ young core took a huge step towards stardom, and the connection between Gaudreau, Sean Monahan and Elias Lindholm was a big part of the reason why.
Gaudreau finished that season with 36 goals and 63 assists, while Monahan scored 34 goals and added 48 assists. Lindholm, meanwhile, scored 27 and had 51 helpers in his first season with the Flames.
The three young forwards brought out the best in each other and seemed to love playing together.
That was best exemplified by their famous Purple Gatorade celebration, where Gaudreau would take a swig before dutifully squirting a bit of the drink for each of his linemates after they’d combined for a goal.
It became a social media sensation and was the sort of in-game fun that made fans love Gaudreau so much.
In August, after Gaudreau’s death and a fan-made memorial grew on the steps of the Saddledome, thousands of bottles of purple Gatorade were left at the rink.
There were even reports that nearby stores were selling out of the drink.
Six points
When: March 12, 2019
We just covered how productive Gaudreau was in 2018-19, but it’s worth emphasizing just how dominant he was at times that year as the Flames cruised to first place in the Western Conference with a 50-25-7 record.
His connection with Monahan was never better and there were times where it just felt like Gaudreau could take over and win a game on his own. He’d been a star in Calgary since Day 1, but he took things to another level that season.
No game is more representative of that than the mid-March matchup against the New Jersey Devils where Gaudreau scored three goals and added three assists to lead the Flames to a 9-4 win.
He was everywhere that night and while six points is always surprising, it didn’t feel shocking in the moment. He’d been that good.
100 points, finally
When: April 12, 2022
Gaudreau had fallen one point short of reaching the 100-point milestone in the 2018-19 season.
That wouldn’t happen again in 2022, when his line with Elias Lindholm and Matthew Tkachuk was the best in the NHL.
With his parents in the stands, Gaudreau assisted on a Tkachuk goal in a win over the Seattle Kraken to finally reach 100 points in a season.
That’s something no Flames player had done since Theo Fleury hit 100 points in the 1992-93 season, and the way the Saddledome crowd erupted showed just how much everyone was rooting for Gaudreau to finally get there.
Gaudreau finished the 2021-22 season with 115 points, second in the NHL behind Connor McDavid.
Game 7
When: May 15, 2022
An overtime winner in Game 7 is huge no matter who scores it, but when Gaudreau beat Jake Oettinger from a tight angle in OT to send the Flames to Round 2 of the playoffs in 2022, the Saddledome might have been louder than it’s ever been.
The Dallas Stars goalie had been incredible all series. The Flames had outplayed the Stars, but Oettinger’s heroics had somehow pushed things right to the brink.
And remember that Calgary was desperate for playoff success. They had won only one series since the magical run to the Stanley Cup final in 2004 and there were persistent questions about whether their talented group could get over the line in the post-season.
And then, in one magical moment, all that tension was relieved.
Gaudreau fired from a tight angle like only he could and the roof practically came off the Dome.
If you were lucky enough to be there, it was a moment you’ll never forget.
The hug
When: May 15, 2022
I remember filing my story after Gaudreau’s Game 7 heroics and logging on to Twitter to get a sense of the elation across Calgary.
The Flames had posted a clip of Gaudreau stepping off the ice and making a beeline for Monahan, his longtime best friend who was out injured that spring. The short video was everywhere.
The hug they shared symbolized so much. Two young players who had emerged as beloved stars and led the Flames out of their post-Iginla period and helped them become one of the NHL’s top teams.
That hug said it all. Their friendship, their connection, their pride in being Calgary Flames … it was all there. A moment to be cherished.