Gang, we’re into the last chunk of August. European professional leagues are beginning their seasons. Canadian major junior camps begin this week. Heck, college players have reported to their schools and have begun preparations for their upcoming academic and hockey commitments.

However you slice it, summer’s winding down and hockey will soon return. In the case of the Calgary Flames, most of their lingering pieces of business have been handled for awhile. But as training camp looms in the coming weeks, restricted free agent forward Brennan Othmann remains unsigned.

We don’t have any pressing inside intel from either camp, but we can make a few reasonable judgments based on what we know – and what we think we know – about how the Flames operate and what tends to drive young players in these types of negotiations.

Let’s put ourselves in Othmann’s skates for a moment. He’s a 23-year-old left shot forward who’s able to play either wing. A 2021 first-round pick, he wasn’t able to get a toehold on a regular basis with the New York Rangers during his entry-level years, which led to him being traded to the Flames prior to the trade deadline. But he still managed to play 44 NHL games during his ELC. Othmann has shown that he’s good enough to play in the NHL… but perhaps it isn’t clear what qualities will make him a regular quite yet.

When you’re leaving your entry-level years, as a young player you probably are hoping for a clear pathway to the NHL or a chance to make decent money. Ideally, you would like both.

The Flames have been pretty consistent with how they handle players in Othmann’s situation; William Strömgren, a forward that’s the same age and draft class as Othmann, just got a league-minimum ($850,000) one year, two-way from the Flames earlier in the summer. So it’s probably safe for us to assume that Othmann’s eventual new deal probably carries an $850,000 cap hit.

But what about the AHL compensation? Considering the glut of NHL-level forwards in the system, it’s probably reasonable to suspect a good chunk of Othmann’s 2026-27 season would likely be spent with the Wranglers – heck, maybe all of it – so a good AHL salary would probably move the needle a bit for a player in his situation. (Again: if I were in his position, I’d want a clear NHL pathway or good money, and a clear NHL pathway might be tough to promise.) Per PuckPedia, Strömgren’s deal carries $110,000 in AHL salary, with $170,000 of compensation guaranteed. Othmann played way more NHL games on his ELC – 44 to Strömgren’s 3 – and out-scored him in the AHL on a per-game basis – 0.69 points-per-game to Strömgren’s 0.60 – so there’s a case to be made for Othmann to get a higher level of AHL pay.

If you look at how the Flames have doled out AHL compensation and guaranteed minor-league money on two-way deals, they haven’t shied away from shelling out bigger bucks… but it’s usually gone to pretty established minor-league players. If we rummage through PuckPedia’s player pages, here are the AHL salaries of Flames two-way players (excluding entry-level deals):

Based on this hierarchy, if you wanted to argue for Othmann to be higher on the AHL salary ladder than Strömgren… okay, sure, but how much higher? That’s not entirely clear to us. And when you consider that the Flames have been pretty careful not to make contractual decisions early in their rebuild that will come back to haunt them later – the easiest way to see ample cap space disappear is by giving every player everything they want on their deals – suddenly Othmann’s situation makes a bunch of sense.

It’s a bit odd that Othmann hasn’t been re-signed yet, but it’s also not unprecedented. Since 2024, four RFAs weren’t re-signed until September: Jakob Pelletier, Cole Schwindt and Ilya Solovyov in 2024 and Connor Zary in 2025. Sometimes negotiations just take longer to reach their conclusion, but the looming deadline of the start of training camp in mid-September has historically led to deals.

We’ll see if that trend continues this time.