Some of the parallels in the crease for the Calgary Wranglers are a bit eerie.
Hails from Northern California. Unheralded. At or near the top of the AHL’s goaltending charts. And carrying the Wranglers to the top of the league standings.
Dustin Wolf is in the NHL with the Calgary Flames following one of the best three-year stretches in the AHL’s 88th season. Devin Cooley, Wolf’s successor and California counterpart, is still trying to navigate that same path to an NHL crease someday. Despite a standout WHL career with the Everett Silvertips, Wolf barely managed to get drafted. He went four spots from the bottom of the 2019 NHL Draft to the Flames, the last goaltender taken that year. Too small to ever have much of a career so went the thinking.
Turning pro with the Flames’ former AHL affiliate, the Stockton Heat, in 2021-22, Wolf arrived having just been named the WHL’s top goaltender in back-to-back seasons. He had won a gold medal representing the United States at the World Junior Championship. But go back to February 2021. That’s when the Heat had just relocated to Calgary for the AHL’s abbreviated pandemic season. As the WHL had not opened play yet, Wolf had a chance to take a turn in net. That afternoon of Feb. 21, 2021 inside empty Scotiabank Saddledome, the Toronto Marlies bombarded Wolf with five goals on 11 shots and chased him eight minutes into the second period.
Two nights later against those same Marlies, however, Wolf turned in a 36-save win. Another victory followed before Wolf had to return to Everett. When the following fall arrived, he began to put together one of the best single-season performances in league history. Leading the league with 33 wins, he won spots on the AHL All-Rookie Team, was an AHL First All-Star Team selection, and captured the Aldege “Baz” Bastien Memorial Award as the league’s top netminder as he took the Heat to the Western Conference Finals.
A year later with Flames prospects now full-time in Calgary playing as the Wranglers, Wolf carried the team to a first-place regular-season finish, again took the Bastien hardware, and added the Les Cunningham Award as the league’s most valuable player. That made the first goaltender to be named AHL MVP since 2004.
For an encore in 2023-24, he divided his time between the Flames and Wranglers and put together another standout body of work at the AHL level while starting to establish himself as someone able to become a full-time NHL option in net. The Flames saw enough to send Jacob Markström to the New Jersey Devils this past June and go with a Wolf-Dan Vladar duo.
With Markström’s departure and Wolf’s promotion, however, the organization needed goaltending help. So they turned to Cooley, a 27-year-old and someone who had already passed through three AHL clubs before signing a two-year deal with the Flames right after free agency opened July 1.
What had been Wolf’s AHL crease now belongs to Cooley, who comes from Los Gatos, Calif., just south of San Jose and a little more than 30 minutes away from Wolf’s hometown of Gilroy. And if Wolf came to the Calgary organization needing to show that he could become much more than a seventh-round pick, he at least had been drafted. Cooley was not. He cycled through the USHL, NAHL, and BCHL before arriving in 2017 at the University of Denver, where he spent three seasons but only appeared in 32 games being stuck behind Tanner Jaillet, Filip Larsson, and Magnus Chrona.
He turned pro in 2020-21, going to the ECHL with the Florida Everblades. Then came a leap up to the Milwaukee Admirals, but first there was Connor Ingram, who was putting the last touches on his AHL career in 2021-22 before moving to the NHL. A year later with the Admirals, there was first-round pick Yaroslav Askarov’s arrival. So Cooley went to the Buffalo Sabres last season, but with the Sabres trying to sort out their goaltending decisions, Devon Levi’s ascent, and a crowded picture with the Rochester Americans, Cooley only got into 14 games at the AHL level. A trade to the San Jose Sharks last March at the NHL trade deadline gave Cooley a chance to salvage something from the season. The very modest return for the Sabres? A seventh-round pick.
By that point the Sharks had started to near the end of an eventual 19-54-9 season. Still, Cooley made something of the deal that sent him to his hometown team. The Sharks kept him on the NHL roster, and his NHL debut arrived March 17 at Chicago. Then came his first NHL win April 6. An April 11 visit to Seattle brought his finest moment, a 49-save night that took the Sharks to a 3-1 win.
But with the Sharks engaged in a complete organizational overhaul, Cooley jumped to Calgary when that two-year offer came following the season.
So far it has been the right decision. Size had been the knock against Wolf before he disproved those critiques. That was not an issue for the 6-foot-5 Cooley. But confidence? Consistency? A lack of playing time certainly could not have helped, either. Those issues challenge plenty of goaltenders trying to break through first as AHL regulars and then as candidates for NHL call-ups. He had never really been the go-to option for an AHL club.
With Wolf on the NHL roster and Oskar Dansk, last year’s other Wranglers goaltender, now with the San Diego Gulls, Cooley faced no such roadblocks this season. The Flames brought in Waltteri Ignatjew to round out their AHL goaltending, but he was someone with just 10 games of SHL experience entering the season. The message came clearly that Cooley would be head coach Trent Cull’s number-one in net.
Cooley has backed up that faith. His eight wins tie him for the AHL lead, and the Wranglers are atop the AHL as well at 11-3-0-0. They just sliced through an eight-game homestand, going 6-2-0-0. Cooley closed out that homestand last Sunday, taking down the Henderson Silver Knights with 26 saves in a 4-0 win for his third shutout this season; four nights earlier he had stopped the Bakersfield Condors with 22 saves in another 4-0 decision.
Cooley is a goaltender who has started to figure out – really figure out – the AHL, not altogether unlike what Wolf did previously. After last Sunday’s shutout, his post-game comments to the media credited Wranglers goaltending coach Mackenzie Skapski for mapping out a plan, which includes self-evaluating his work in a post-game report. He cited puck-handling as a key focus area.
“It feels really nice,” Cooley said via the team website, complimenting the work his defenders have done in front of him. “I don’t think there has been a single deflected goal on me.”
That work last week — 81 stops on 83 shots in four games — made Cooley the latest Howies Hockey Tape/AHL Player of the Week.
Next up is a two-game stop in San Jose that opens Saturday. It will be a chance for Cooley to play his first-ever game against the Barracuda, one of the prime challengers to the Wranglers early in this season. They’ll see a goaltender with a .954 save percentage, one that puts him second in the AHL. His 1.46 goals-against average is third-best overall. Calgary could break open the Pacific Division race by as many as 10 points on the Barracuda with two clean wins this weekend in San Jose.
With Askarov now starring for the Barracuda, a match-up of the two former Milwaukee partners could be a treat this weekend. That third shutout last weekend nudged Cooley one past Askarov. After he picked up his Nov. 6 shutout against the Condors, Cooley had joked with the Calgary media about that statistical competition with one of the game’s top prospects.
“I’ve got to keep battling because I need to outcompete him,” Cooley said with a laugh via the team website. “I need bragging rights.”
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