As the Calgary Flames approach the Feb. 25 trade deadline, there’s already been a lot of chatter about the team using draft picks to load up for the playoffs. It’s a tempting proposition, but it’s worth examining a bit further from the perspective of asset and cap management.

The asset life cycle

Increasingly in the modern National Hockey League, key and core players are getting paid a lot and that doesn’t leave a lot of funds left for the lower half of the team’s roster. The Flames’ roster features five players with cap hits north of $5 million (Johnny Gaudreau, Mark Giordano, Sean Monahan, James Neal and Mikael Backlund) and five more making between $4 million and $5 million (Noah Hanifin, Elias Lindholm, TJ Brodie, Michael Frolik and Mike Smith). With star and key depth players getting paid big time, the ability of a team to find long-term success is dependent on their ability to consistently find quality, inexpensive depth players. More and more, that’s through the draft.

The cap world has basically created a life cycle for team assets:

• A player is drafted or signed as an undrafted free agent.
• While on their entry-level contract, that player succeeds in the minors.
• The player is transitioned to the NHL and tries to find a role.
• Having found a role, the player develops within that role.
• At the completion of their entry-level deal (or maybe after a bridge contract), the team either locks the player in long-term OR flips them for future assets.

The likelihood that a player becomes a worthwhile asset – either worth locking in long-term or flipping for future assets – goes up as a player is selected earlier in the NHL Draft.

The challenge of cap management

Here’s a quick snapshot of the Flames’ cap situation for 2019-20, presuming nobody with a one-way contract is traded in the interim:

Gaudreau [$6.750m] – Monahan [$6.375m] – Lindholm [$4.850m]
Tkachuk [RFA] – Backlund [$5.350m] – Frolik [$4.300m]
Bennett [RFA] – Jankowski [$1.950m] – Neal [$5.750m]
Czarnik [$1.250m] – Ryan [$3.125m] – TBD
Extras: TBD
Buyout: Brouwer [$1.500m]

Giordano [$6.750m] – Brodie [$4.650m]
Hanifin [$4.950m] – Hamonic [$3.587m]
Kylington [$0.731m] – Andersson {$0.756m]
Extra: Stone [$3.500m]

Rittich [RFA]
TBD

The 2018-19 Flames roster has featured seven regulars making less than $1 million. Two of those players, Tkachuk and Rittich, are in line for pretty substantial raises. Even with an estimated $83 million cap ceiling next season, the Flames will have a challenge filling their roster out with a couple depth forwards and a backup goalie.

And even if you can entertain the possibility of opening up cap space via trading away an established player, there would be no mystery in what Brad Treliving would be trying to do – Elliotte Friedman often jokes during his radio hits that rival GMs don’t throw their colleagues life jackets, they throw them anvils – and it would be unlikely that those trades would net great returns.

Inexpensive help from the farm?

Even if you manage to move out an established player, then you have to replace them with somebody decent and inexpensive unless the goal is to make the team actively worse in the process.

Immediately, the thoughts for players to fill out the bottom half of the Flames’ 2019-20 roster likely jump to Juuso Valimaki and Dillon Dube. Andrew Mangiapane, a pending restricted free agent, likely won’t get a raise to north of $1 million. But the list of young, inexpensive, good players on the farm gets lean very quickly after that trio.

Let’s just say that one or two of those players get promoted: who takes their spots? It would leave the farm system dependent on so-called “quad-A” players along the lines of Alan Quine, Kerby Rychel, Buddy Robinson and Tyler Graovac. That’s not to say that relying on these types of players for recalls would be a bad thing, but prying quad-A players away from other organizations usually involves one-way deals or structuring two-way contracts with guaranteed salaries at the AHL level.

Because of the financial and developmental considerations, it’s important for NHL clubs like the Flames to have inexpensive youth waiting on the farm. And if Dube, Valimaki and/or Mangiapane are promoted to the NHL full-time, they should ideally be replaced with other inexpensive youth. That’s where trading draft picks becomes a bit of a challenge.

Replenishing the system

Heading into the 2019 draft, the Flames have picks in the first, third, fourth (via Islanders), fifth and seventh (via Hurricanes) rounds. That’s it. Five picks over seven rounds.

The players potentially entering the entry-level system are Adam Ruzicka, Martin Pospisil, D’Artagnan Joly, Milos Roman, and perhaps one or two of the European prospects like Eetu Tuulola, Linus Lindstrom or Filip Sveningsson. All due respect to the aforementioned gentlemen, but it’s unlikely that any of them will play significant NHL time in 2019-20 the way Valimaki and Dube did. These guys will need some seasoning before they become cheap depth options.

But who’s coming up behind those guys? Who will be ready to go pro in 2020-21? The balancing act Treliving and his staff have to figure out going forward is how to replace the cheap depth players that are coming out of the entry-level system with players that will become cheap depth before they leave their entry-level years.

It’s entirely possible to keep the carousel of finding and developing good young players spinning while trading draft picks for rental players. But it’s making their minor league feeder system really dependent on their scouting staff’s ability to find, recruit and sign undrafted talent from major junior, Europe and college – they’ve done so in recent years with players like Glenn Gawdin, Nick Schneider, Josh Healey, Ryan Lomberg and Garnet Hathaway. Life could become very difficult for the Flames going forward if they take too many big swings by trading picks, so they’re going to have to pick their spots.