Report: Calgary Flames maintain signing rights to Demetrios Koumontzis, but lose signing rights to Josh Nodler

The National Hockey League’s annual August 15 deadline for signing draftees that are departing college – via graduation or withdrawal – has come and gone. The Calgary Flames announced zero signings by the 3 p.m. MT deadline, and ended up maintaining the signing rights to 2018 fourth-round pick Demetrios Koumontzis but lost the rights to 2019 fifth-rounder Josh Nodler.

Koumontzis remained on the Flames’ reserve list after the deadline, while Nodler disappeared.

So we’ll begin with a disclaimer: the signing rights rules for college players within the CBA are written in a fairly obtuse way, and some of the clauses require information that we simply do not have in order to prognosticate signing rights expiring. As a result, we have to make assumptions.

The broad assumptions we make are that, based on the simplest clause in that section of the CBA, a player’s signing rights expire on August 15 following the graduation of their college class. And we assume that if a player’s college playing eligibility expires – e.g., they play out their four years (sometimes five due to injury) and then go play pro – they graduate and their signing rights expire soon after.

That’s not always the case.

Section 8.6 (c), which tackles college eligibility and signing rights, contains a bit of additional context regarding how long a players’ rights stay with their drafting club:

This is a long way of saying that Koumontzis, who had completed his redshirt season with Arizona State University in 2022-23 – he was allowed one due to being on an NCAA roster during the COVID-disrupted 2020-21 season – was expected to leave the Flames’ reserve list based on our broader understanding of how Section 8.6 (c) works, but it appears not enough of the requirements were met to trigger that. (We apologize for any confusion our original report may have caused; we, ourselves, were confused.)

Similarly, it appears that Nodler, who’s about to begin his redshirt season with Bowling Green State University and is currently listed on their roster, has already met enough of the requirements to trigger being removed from the Flames’ reserve list.