The National Hockey League’s 2019-20 trade deadline is today at 1 p.m. MT. After that point, players added to a team’s reserve list are not eligible to play in the Stanley Cup playoffs. The Calgary Flames are in the midst of a fevered battle to reach those playoffs.
What are the constraining factors the Flames are dealing with right now, in terms of contracts, waivers and the salary cap?

Roster and contract limit

Until the trade deadline, the Flames are limited to 23 players on their NHL roster. They’re also constrained by the NHL’s rule regarding 50 active contracts.
Right now, the Flames are using all 23 of their roster spots:
  • Goalies (2): David Rittich and Cam Talbot
  • Defensemen (7): Rasmus Andersson, Brandon Davidson, TJ Brodie, Michael Stone, Alexander Yelesin, Noah Hanifin and Oliver Kylington
  • Forwards (14): Derek Ryan, Mikael Backlund, Johnny Gaudreau, Tobias Rieder, Milan Lucic, Matthew Tkachuk, Sean Monahan, Elias Lindholm, Dillon Dube, Zac Rinaldo, Buddy Robinson, Mark Jankowski, Andrew Mangiapane and Sam Bennett
Three more players are on the injured reserve: Mark Giordano, Travis Hamonic and Juuso Valimaki. They don’t count against the roster limit.
The Flames have 44 players under active contracts – this doesn’t include Jakob Pelletier and Dmitry Zavgorodniy, whose deals slide this season. The limit matters primarily in that it restricts how many players an organization can add. Aside from trades, often teams try to lure college free agents by “burning” the first year of their deal immediately – if you’re at the contract limit, you lose that ability.

Waivers and the Recall Limit

Remember the 23-man roster limit? Well, NHL clubs often get around that by sending waiver exempt players to the AHL to temporarily open a roster spot for a player being acquired. Teams also send players down to the AHL to keep them eligible to play in the AHL for the rest of the season – if you’re not on the AHL roster as of the trade deadline, you’re not eligible to play there for the remainder of the year (aside from on a conditioning stint).
As noted yesterday, only a handful of Flames are waiver exempt right now:
  • Dillon Dube
  • Alexander Yelesin
  • Oliver Kylington
  • Juuso Valimaki
  • Buddy Robinson
After the trade deadline, the Flames can only call up an AHLer four times under non-emergency conditions – “emergency conditions” means you don’t have enough healthy bodies to fill an NHL lineup. When a player is activated off the IR – Giordano, Hamonic or Valimaki – it doesn’t impact the recall limit. If a player is brought up under emergency conditions and the team decides to keep them up after the emergency, that would use up a recall.

The Salary Cap

The cap ceiling is $81.5 million. The Flames have $79.8 million in cap hits right now – between their active roster, the injured reserve, buyouts, and buried cap hits. That leaves them with approximately $2.333 million that they can add at the deadline and remain cap compliant.)
(The Flames were below the cap ceiling for a chunk of the season and have been accumulating savings for most of the year – aside from the brief spell using the long-term injury reserve relief – so that’s why the math doesn’t seem to add up.)
Potentially complicating things are a handful of players who have performance bonuses built into their deals: Dube, Valimaki, Kylington, Andersson and Yelesin. Our sources indicate that Valimaki and Yelesin’s are major bonuses tied to performances and awards – they probably won’t be met – but Dube, Kylington and Andersson have games-played thresholds that trigger bonuses. Teams are allowed to go over the cap by their bonuses, but any over-spend comes off of next season’s cap number.

Pending Free Agents

Finally, the Flames have a lot of players on expiring contracts of various kinds:
  • Unrestricted Free Agents (): Robinson, Rieder, Rinaldo, Brodie, Hamonic, Davidson, Stone, Talbot,  Austin Czarnik, Alan Quine and Byron Froese
  • Group 6 UFAs (2): Jon Gillies and Ryan Lomberg
  • Restricted Free Agents (10): Jankowski, Mangiapane, Kylington, Glenn Gawdin, Justin Kirkland, Rinat Valiev, Andrew Nielsen, Artyom Zagidulin, Tyler Parsons and Nick Schneider