'You know my benchmarks': Flames youngster Matvei Gridin not backing down from ambitious goals this season

Instead, he just alluded to what he said back in April at his exit meeting with Calgary Flames head coach Ryan Huska when he was asked about his goals for the 2026-27 season.

Gridin said back in the spring that he wanted to lead the Flames in scoring, and even if he won’t say it again he isn’t backing down from the challenge he set for himself.

“You know my benchmarks, I said it last year in exit meetings and Husk said it so I’ll just try to do that,” Gridin said. “I won’t say it again, but you guys know what I’m talking about.”

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Gridin’s never been short on confidence, but it should be music to the ears of Flames fans that he’s setting ambitions as high as he is. Set expectations wherever you want, he believes in his ability to meet them.

And for a Flames team that has been offensively challenged over the past couple seasons, having a 20-year-old winger who is happy to publicly state his intentions to put up big numbers can only be a positive thing.

And it’s not like Gridin isn’t putting in the work. He didn’t take a vacation this off-season. Instead, he grinded away back home in Russia, working largely with his father but also training with a group of Russian NHLers in Moscow that included Mikhail Sergachev, Artemi Panarin, Kirill Marchenko, Andrei Kuzmenko and Flames teammates Aydar Suniev and Maxim Tsyplakov.

There’s reasons to be excited about what the coming season could hold for the young Russian.

This weekend, though, he’s back with the Flames’ young guns at the team’s rookie camp.

“I thought he was fantastic today, he was first in every drill, he asked the right questions, he did every drill right,” said Wranglers head coach Brett Sutter, who was running the on-ice sessions on Saturday at the Saddledome. “His details were in place and I thought he picked up on some of those new systems right away. I think he did everything we asked of him and more, he was out there, he was being a leader and he competed really hard.

“I think looking around that room, guys are probably looking up to him. He’s a guy who was in this camp last year as a first-year player, had a good camp, found his way onto the Flames. He’s going to be a leader here, he’s going to be a guy that guys look up to and I thought he did a good job taking charge.”

There is probably an argument that a guy like Gridin could have skipped rookie camp. He did, after all, play 37 NHL games last season and scored six goals while adding 14 assists. If he’d played a full 82 games and kept up that pace, he would have finished with 44 points, right behind the Flames’ top point producer, Matt Coronato.