Snow’s legacy felt daily among Flames staff

Three weeks ago, Kelsie Snow came into the Calgary Flames offices at the Saddledome to clear out the office of her late husband, former assistant general manager Chris Snow.

Snow, who had been with the Flames for more than 12 years, passed away on Sept. 30, 2023, at the age of 42 after a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

“It was one of the hardest things I’ve done since he died,” she wrote on social media. “He LOVED his job, and we made so many memories during his 12.5 years in that space.”

While his office is now vacant, Snow’s legacy with the Flames lives on and his presence is felt daily. 

“Every day when I walk in, I look at that office, and that’s where he was every day,” general manager Craig Conroy said in a recent interview.

Conroy reminisced about the differing views the two friends had on the game – Conroy as the hockey lifer and Snow as the numbers expert. The two worked together for more than a decade.

“You miss that part,” Conroy said, of those debates. “He used to get mad at me because I got a lot of my [analytics information] from fantasy baseball,” he continued, laughing at the memory. 

Snow would ask where Conroy got his perspective.

“I’d say, ‘On the websites of fantasy baseball,’” Conroy said. “And he’s like, ‘Really?’”

The processes and workflows Snow installed during his time with the Flames remain in place. He negotiated contracts with free agents, distilled data for coaches for in-game use, and used analytics to build models that could help predict future player performance. He also voiced his data-driven opinions on who the Flames would select in the draft.

Before he was hired by then-general manager Jay Feaster in 2011, the Flames didn’t have a formal data and analytics department. Snow built one from the ground up, and it now has four full-time staffers.

“Chris had this vision of where he wanted to go,” Conroy said. “He was really the driving force behind everything. He maybe didn’t code, but he was the one that knew the vision of what he wanted and that’s what he’s built.”

Snow had a voice in every player personnel decision. The models and methods he created are a huge reason the organization signed players like Rasmus Andersson, Elias Lindholm, and Noah Hanifin (and before them, Johnny Gaudreau and Andrew Mangiapane) to team-friendly contracts.

Snow also created the Flames’ internal website that tracks stats and player comparables. Conroy and his staff use it every day.

“I click and [the reports] are all there on the individual games,” Conroy said. “It’s how he simplified it to make things quicker, to make things more efficient…with your data, who are the comparables around the league? These are the little things [Snow worked on].”

Michael Charron now manages the Flames’ data and analytics department, building off the framework Snow built.

“I’d known him for five years and I learned a lot from him,” Charron said. “Not only about analytics specifics, but how to think about the game, how to continue to innovate the tools we have and he left us with.”

His former coworkers also carry his legacy forward in how he treated others. Despite his wealth of knowledge in advanced stats, Snow was the ultimate collaborator, seeking the opinions of others.

“He wanted to people to bring ideas,” Conroy said. “He said, ‘I don’t know if I have all the right ideas.’”

Snow was also known as a sensitive, kind boss who went the extra mile to check in on employees and take care of them. 

“He was always trying to make my life better,” said video analyst Connor Rankin. “Whether it was that I was having a housewarming party and he’d bring over a box of wine, and it extends to his family – Kelsie, Cohen, Willa [Snow’s children], amazing people.”

Rankin recalled how Snow shared life-changing news with him. Rankin had worked part-time in the Flames’ data and analytics department while studying accounting at Mount Royal University in Calgary. In 2019, Snow told Rankin about his promotion to full-time staffer in one of the most storied settings in sports. 

“I’ll never forget the moment I got the job full-time,” he said. “He knew for a couple of weeks. He invited me to Boston when he threw the first pitch at the Red Sox game. Second, third inning, we were just watching the game and that’s when he told me, because he wanted to make it special. He told me at a suite in Fenway Park.”

Conroy said hadn’t heard that story before. Even with Snow gone, his long-time teammates are still learning new things about him.

When talking about Snow’s lasting impact on the organization moving forward, Conroy, Rankin, and Charron kept repeating one word: more. 

There were always more leagues to track. More players to discover. More data to unearth. The department’s grown bigger over the past few months, and the Flames are committed to seeing Snow’s work through while also remembering his impact as a human being. 

“You lose a guy in your corner in that sense, it’s tough, right?” Rankin said. “Every time I do this job, you’re missing a boss but you’re also missing a friend that you did this with and talked with…he had a big vision for this, and I don’t think it’s done yet…it’s up to us now to carry the legacy.”