When Bob Hartley became the Flames' head coach, he wasn't signing up for a rebuild. The team desperately needed one, but at the start of the 2012-13 season, that wasn't the objective. They still had Jarome Iginla, they still had Miikka Kiprusoff, and the objective remained clear: just make the playoffs, and anything can happen.
Only the Flames hadn't made the playoffs for a while, and they weren't about to that year. The 2013 season was a disaster from the start, in part thanks to Hartley, a coach unfamiliar with his new players, having only a shortened training camp with which to work.