FlamesNation Mailbag: Ringing in the New Year with lots of trade-related questions

Happy New Year, everybody! As we hit the cosmic reset button and look ahead to 2024, we do what we do on most Mondays: dive into the FlamesNation mailbag to see what everybody’s curious about.

Join us, won’t you?

If the Flames are over this year’s salary cap ceiling ($83.5 million) by virtue of performance bonuses, whatever amount they’re over the cap will be deducted from next year’s cap limit. (It’s essentially penalizing a team for being over the cap by taking away their ability to spend the following season by the same amount.)

Whenever you see a trade involving Future Considerations, it’s a placeholder because teams aren’t allowed to just give assets away, so they have to technically be trading for something in order for the league to process the trade. In Monahan’s case, the Flames were engaging in a cap dump and so nothing was going back the Flames’ way aside from Future Considerations.

Years back, sometimes Future Considerations were used to indicate that an asset would be sent later on to complete a trade – the Flames engaged in a few of those in the 1970s and 1980s, and the most recent may have been when Robyn Regehr was added into the Theoren Fleury trade between the Flames and Colorado back in 1999 a couple weeks after the main trade had been conducted.

I’m gonna guess Chris Tanev. He’s very good, but he’s also somebody I would be worried about getting banged up before I can trade for him. If I’m a GM on a team that has designs on a long playoff run, I want to acquire Tanev as soon as I can… and then bubble-wrap him until the playoffs start.

(I won’t venture a guess about a potential destination because I would probably be very wrong, but I would imagine the Flames would love to get a second-round pick and potentially another asset back for him.)

I will say two things about Dillon Dube:

[1] He hasn’t had a very good season and he’s been dropped to the fourth line very deservedly as a result.

[2] He’s still pretty young and he has a really intriguing package of speed, skill and snarl. He probably shouldn’t be a fourth-liner because his checking style probably isn’t ideally suited to that role. But he’s shown flashes of brilliance during recent years that you can kind of understand why the Flames would still value him as a player and asset. I could see him getting sat on a back-to-back to give him a bit of a reset, but the big challenge for him is getting the opportunity to carve out a clear and consistent role for himself.

Our pal Randy Sportak over at The Hockey News wrote a column a little while back that captured this quite well. (Check it out!)

Basically, I’m in agreement with Sportak. If the Flames decide that they’re embarking on a bit of a new direction and that they might not be contenders for the remainder of Markstrom’s contract, you probably owe it to him to have the conversation about what he wants to do. If he wants to stick around Calgary, great. If he wants to be elsewhere, the Flames can probably make that happen based on how well the netminder is playing.

I don’t think the Flames can get out from under Jonathan Huberdeau’s contract. Full-stop. The only way out is through, and by that I mean: they’ve got to ride it out.

I imagine this off-season the Flames will have oodles of cap space and a bevy of draft picks at their disposal. So there will be a bunch of potential opportunities to grab some players that may be a bit overpaid (cap-wise) relative to their on-ice merits. The challenge will be grabbing guys that mesh well with Huberdeau, because that’s been a consistent challenge with the existing group. I think a lot of different options will be explored to make that happen, because the Flames need to get as much good hockey as they can out of Huberdeau.

I like Noah Hanifin. I think he’s quite good at his role. But I think that signing him to a hefty deal will essentially give a similar raise to Rasmus Andersson on that player’s next deal, and the mechanics of giving a bunch of money to a handful of blueliners may cause roster construction and/or cap challenges. If you think you’re going to be a contender, that’s probably a pain you feel you can manage for the good it does your team to have the player. If you’re aiming to retool, you might as well swap out Hanifin to a contending team and get some assets back to speed along the whole process.