Michael Frolik and Travis Hamonic on TSN’s trade bait list

Most of the National Hockey League is firmly into their off-season and so trade chatter is beginning to pick up. TSN’s Frank Seravalli has compiled the first installment of his trade bait board and it features a pair of Calgary Flames: Michael Frolik and Travis Hamonic.

Ranked sixth on the TSN list, the inclusion of Frolik really shouldn’t shock anybody. He bounced around the Flames’ lineup quite a bit last season and it seemed evident that he and head coach Bill Peters never really entirely saw eye-to-eye on his role. He finally landed back on the second line full-time in the second half of the season, but that was after some pretty vocal Twitter campaigning from his agent, Octagon’s Allan Walsh. Frolik has one year left on his current contract with a $4.3 million cap hit.

The Flames were reportedly close on a trade with the Minnesota Wild involving Frolik prior to the trade deadline, indicating that potentially the club would be happy to be without a potential headache going forward. It seems logical to assume that if they were fine with moving Frolik at the deadline, they would be this off-season as well.

Ranked 11th on the list, Hamonic is also heading into the final year of his current contract – he has a $3.857 million cap hit for 2019-20. The inclusion of Hamonic is probably a product of Rasmus Andersson’s big improvement last season, as Andersson obviously deserves a bigger role next season and the logical right side defenders to move are Hamonic and TJ Brodie.

That said, the long-term fit with Hamonic on the Flames’ roster as the lone physical defender seems better than Brodie’s going forward. We’ll see what happens, but it’s obvious that the Flames would prefer to get something for either Hamonic or Brodie rather than losing them to unrestricted free agency at the end of the 2019-20 season (or to Seattle in the upcoming 2021 expansion draft).