Calgary Flames opening roster becomes clearer with waiver moves

The Calgary Flames began Saturday with 25 players on their training camp roster, plus a quartet of unavailable players due to injuries and personal reasons. After placing three players on waivers, their opening night roster has become a lot clearer.

Placed on waivers were active players Juuso Valimaki and Radim Zohorna, and previously-injured player Dennis Gilbert. If these players clear waivers, the Flames will have the ability to send them to the American League’s Calgary Wranglers.

General manager Brad Treliving, speaking with the media just after the waiver announcements went live, reflected on placing Valimaki on the waiver wire.

“I think we all know, it’s been a tough couple years for Juuso,” said Treliving. “He’d had some injuries, and then just getting some traction here the last little bit. So we’ll see where it all goes. We’re like everybody else, we’ve got to get down in our roster situation.”

Asked about his opening night roster’s composition, Treliving didn’t give up much.

“We’ve got a bunch of different scenarios,” said Treliving. “We’ll see. There’s cap implications when you look at Kylington’s cap number and him not being available. He’s got to show up on our roster and potentially down the road if there’s an LTI placement, you want to eat up as much of your salary cap as you can, you want to get as close to your salary cap as you can. There’ll be some cap manoeuvring as we go through it. Ultimately you’re just trying to ice the best roster you can.”

The camp roster looked roughly like this as of Saturday morning:

If we assume that Valimaki, Zohorna and Gilbert are all elsewhere by Sunday – claimed or assigned to the minors – then the Flames have 23 players left, including PTO Michael Stone (who the club would need decide what to do with).

Our understanding from consulting the CBA, cap resources, and recent similar situations is that Kylington will likely be declared a non-roster player, not counting against the 23-man limit but counting against the cap, which aligns with Treliving’s comments.

Excluding Stone and taking the pessimistic salary cap view (that Valimaki is not claimed and so the Flames carry a $425,000 cap penalty while he’s in the AHL), the projected 22-man roster would have $750,000 of space remaining.

We’ll see how the Flames’ opening roster looks when it’s filed with the league on Monday at 3 p.m. MT.