Friends, the Stanley Cup has been awarded for the 2025-26 season, with Mark Jankowski and the Carolina Hurricanes victorious after two lengthy months of post-season play.

Now, it’s time to get down to off-season business.

As the Stanley Cup Final ended on June 14, the first buyout period in the NHL calendar opens up after a two day break on June 17. The question every year around this time is posed: will the Calgary Flames pursue any buyouts?

This summer, the Flames should not – and probably will not – make any contract buyouts.

The reasoning behind our conclusion is both a bit complicated and also fairly straightforward.

We’ll start with the straightforward part: they don’t need to.

The salary cap ceiling for the 2025-26 season is a whopping $104 million. (The cap floor is $76.9 million.) When we examined the Flames’ cap situation a little while back – with a stick-tap to our partners at PuckPedia – the Flames’ players on one-way contracts, plus Nazem Kadri’s retained salary and the cap hits for Sam Honzek, Zayne Parekh and Matvei Gridin, on two-ways but likely NHLers, came out to $81.2 million. You’ll notice that they’ve got $22.8 million in cap space and are way closer to the cap floor than the ceiling.

In short: there’s no point in worrying about buyouts. They don’t need to jump through hoops to create any cap space. They have a ton. They’re good.

But let’s say they really wanted to in order to open up a roster spot for a younger player. What if they were hellbent on buying someone out?

Well, Jonathan Huberdeau has a $10.5 million cap hit for five more seasons and, all due respect to him, his offensive contributions haven’t quite measured up to his cap hit. Now, he’s currently recovering from hip surgery and per league rules, you can’t buy out an injured player. And considering how well he looked in 2024-25, before his nagging hip injury made his 2025-26 a nightmare, the Flames probably want to see how he looks at 100%.

But even if they could buy out Huberdeau, and if they wanted to, there’s no real substantial cap space benefit to buying him out. Under the league’s buyout rules, the cost of a buyout is two-thirds of their remaining base salary over twice the number of years left on their contract if they’re 26 or older. (If they’re 25 or younger, the formula is one-third base salary over twice the number of years remaining.) But the vast majority of Huberdeau’s compensation is signing bonuses, not salary, and bonuses can’t be bought out.

Per PuckPedia’s buyout calculator, here’s what the cap hits on a bought-out Huberdeau deal would be:

There’s no real incentive to pursue it.

The only other real contender for a buyout would be Yegor Sharangovich’s $5.75 million AAV deal, which has four years left on it. They don’t need the cap space and it probably makes more sense for both the team’s progression and Sharangovich’s recovery as a player and asset to give him a chance to rediscover the form that allowed him to score 31 goals in 2023-24.

The Flames don’t need any additional cap space. They don’t really have an excess of talented young players being blocked by any veterans right now. That probably changes in the future, but for this year, we would not expect them to buy anybody out.

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