2 days Ago By Wes Gilbertson
You could make a case they are the two most important players on the Calgary Flames’ roster, pillars both. And when you stop to think about it, Dustin Wolf and MacKenzie Weegar are also perfect poster-boys for a team that wasn’t supposed to have a sniff of this playoff race. The Flames are facing long odds, no doubt, many ready to once again write ’em off in their wild-card quest, but these dudes have been there, done that and proved already to be the pluckiest of underdogs.
Wolf and Weegar, remember, were seventh-round draft picks. One is now a Calder Trophy frontrunner , a bonafide rising star between the pipes . The other logs huge minutes on the blue line, always wears his heart on the sleeve of his jersey and seems to be the most obvious candidate to be Calgary’s next captain.
“(Wolf) wants to be in the moment. He loves it,” Weegar said. “And same with me, I want the moment.
I want to be in the light too. “Especially when you were a seventh-rounder, you never got the light before. So when you get it .
.. ” When their names were called on draft day, the janitors were just about to switch out the lights.
Weegar was the sixth-from-last pick in 2013, selected by the Florida Panthers at No. 206 overall. Sixty-six other defencemen were off the board by then.
Wolf was the fourth-from-last pick in 2019. The undersized netminder had been squirming in his seat at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, his loved ones and friends erupting in applause when the Flames figured he was worth the gamble at No. 214 overall.
(Good call.) “It’s certainly become a story and probably will be for quite a while,” said Wolf, 22nd of the 22 puck-stopping prospects to be drafted in 2019, of his status as a seventh-round steal. “But I never thought of myself as that, right? I always thought of myself as a really good goaltender who can help a team win a lot of hockey games.
Obviously, I’m very fortunate that the Flames took a chance on me. I’m trying to do my best to make them look good. “The more and more you continue to prove others wrong, the more people are going to show out and talk about you.
You’re not expected to do well when you’re a low pick. So when you do well, they start talking. So I guess it’s a good thing.
” This should, whatever happens over the next two-and-a-half weeks, go down as a did-well campaign for the Flames, although Wolf and Weegar and their pals are far from satisfied yet, still determined to get their paws on what would be an unlikely invite to the Stanley Cup spring formal..
