Tkachuk bumps Conroy down a peg on Flames’ franchise scoring list:

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There’s not typically much buzz about 22nd spot on any franchise record list, but both men — a first-line forward and a hockey-ops honcho — had this stat on their radar.

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With a two-point performance in his latest outing, Matthew Tkachuk leapfrogged one of his bosses, Craig Conroy, on the Calgary Flames’ all-time scoring charts.

“Someone tweeted about it a while ago and my daughter said, ‘Did you see this, Dad?’ ” said Conroy, an assistant general manager for the Flames. “So I was kind of laughing about it and I sent him a text. And he was like, ‘What? This is embarrassing that it took me this long!’ I said, ‘I know, I was just a checker! It’s not like this is your first year in the league.’

“We were joking around about it. I actually thought he passed me a while ago. I guess I had more points here than I thought.”

Conroy, who spent parts of nine seasons on Saddledome ice, became Jarome Iginla’s bestie and is still beloved by the local fan-base, totalled 308 points in 507 appearances with the Flaming C on his chest.

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Tkachuk, already in his sixth campaign in Cowtown, is now at 309.

The 24-year-old alternate captain pulled even with Conroy thanks to a second-period strike in Friday’s 6-3 road loss to the Carolina Hurricanes. They shared a line in the club history books for all of 15 minutes before ‘Chucky’ earned a secondary assist on Johnny Gaudreau’s breakaway marker in the third.

That’s about as long as Conroy and Tkachuk’s father, Keith, were teammates with the St. Louis Blues on deadline day in 2001. (They later suited up together for the Americans at the 2004 World Cup of Hockey and 2006 Winter Olympics.)

“The day I got traded to Calgary was the day he got traded to St. Louis,” Conroy recalled. “Actually, Nick Kypreos called me and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about the trade?’ I was like, ‘Wow, we’ve got some great players coming in.’ And then he interrupted and said, ‘No, I’m talking about your trade.’ I was like, ‘I’m not traded!’ He says, ‘Oh, can I call you back?’ ”

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The Blues were in Philadelphia to face the Flyers that evening.

“And then Larry Pleau called me, like, 10 minutes later and asked me to come to his room,” said Conroy, referring to the former general manager of the Blues. “I couldn’t find anything online and it was after 3 o’clock, and I didn’t know how it worked. Now that I’m in management, I know if (a trade) is in the queue before 3 p.m., they just have to work through it. But at the time, I was like, ‘No, it’s after 3 o’clock. I’m safe.’ ”

He pauses. Then chuckles.

“Well, I was not so safe. It was already in the queue,” Conroy said. “That was a tough one, but it worked out great for me.”

It was a tough week for the Flames, who wrapped their latest road-trip with back-to-back-to-back humblings from three of the top squads in the Eastern Conference.

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They were outgunned by a combined score of 16-6 by the Florida Panthers, Tampa Bay Lightning and Hurricanes, stoking concerns that they don’t have enough depth and secondary-scoring punch to hang with the contenders.

There’s plenty to be positive about, though, including a 17-10-6 record — good for a .606 point percentage — and the fact that their top-end talents are certainly doing their part

Tkachuk faced a lot of criticism last winter, when he was not as productive or peppy as usual as the Flames missed the playoffs in a strange season that included empty rinks and an all-Canadian division. He has responded with 15 goals and 16 assists in 33 spins so far in 2021-22. With his next tally, he’ll match his total from the 56-game slate.

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While Darryl Sutter split his first line of Gaudreau, Tkachuk and Elias Lindholm in Carolina, that’s not an indictment of their performance, rather an effort to get some of the other guys going.

“At the end of last year, Matthew was probably the hardest of anybody on himself that, ‘Hey, that wasn’t the way I play,’ ” Conroy said. “For me, a lot of it was he feeds off the crowd. He feeds off the energy in the building. I always thought, going into it, it was going to be hard for some guys, and he is the No. 1 guy for me. Because that’s part of his game. He’s in there and the crowd is on him, yelling at him, either for or against him. He thrives off that stuff. It brings his game to another level.

“The other thing is he came into camp in really good shape this year, ready, focused and like, ‘Hey, I’m back.’ ”

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As part of the braintrust, Conroy scouted Tkachuk during his junior stint with the Ontario Hockey League’s London Knights and was on the stage when the Flames selected this chip-off-the-old block with the sixth-overall pick in the 2016 NHL Draft.

“It’s been so much fun to watch him grow as a player,” said Conroy, who still holds the edge over Tkachuk in career points — he amassed 542 when you include his stops in Montreal, St. Louis and Los Angeles. “It’s the same with all the guys. When you draft guys and you bring ’em in and then you see them kind of evolve into the players they are now as veterans and leaders on the team and top players in the league, it’s fun.

“I remember we were in Penticton and Matthew came up to me and said, ‘Hey, just a question — how did (Sean) Monahan stay that first year?’ I told him, ‘He just played so well that we couldn’t send him back to junior.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, that’s all I have to do?’ That’s Matthew’s personality, right? ‘Oh, that’s it? OK, I’m doing that.’

“He has just such a confidence about him, he believes in himself and to watch him kind of grow since then into the player he is now … I mean, every team would love to have a Matthew Tkachuk.”

ICE CHIPS : The Flames reassigned centre Byron Froese from the taxi squad to the American Hockey League’s Stockton Heat. The 30-year-old was called up Dec. 9, fresh off his first AHL hat-trick, but didn’t draw into Calgary’s lineup during this stint with the big club.

wgilbertson@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/WesGilbertson