Folks, if you’ve been paying attention to the hockey world over the last few days, one of the more unique, interesting topics has been how precarious the Toronto Maple Leafs’ salary cap situation is.

In short: because of their cap commitments for next season and how “tagging room” is calculated, the Maple Leafs are pretty restricted right now (and potentially for the rest of the year).

We were curious, so we took a look at PuckPedia to see how the Flames’ cap situation is looking. The Flames have ample cap space – about $43 million in tagging room – because so many of their current players, on the NHL and AHL roster, are on expiring contracts that don’t eat into next season’s cap space yet.

Here’s a quick, high-level rundown of the Flames’ 21 expiring deals.

These are your “traditional” UFAs: players that are 27 years old or older on expiring deals.

The 10 pending UFAS are defencemen Joel Hanley, Brayden Pachal and Jake Livingstone, and forwards Ryan Strome, Morgan Frost, Maxim Tsyplakov, Dryden Hunt, Alex Nylander, Ben Jones and Sam Morton.

Group 6 UFAs are players on expiring deals, who are 24 or older, have played three or more years on NHL contracts, and have played fewer than 80 career games for skaters or 28 games for goaltenders.

The Flames have two likely Group 6 UFAs: Rory Kerins (9 games) and Mike Benning (18 games).

Yan Kuznetsov is a potential Group 6 UFA, but he’s already played 71 games. He seems like a lock to reach 80 games and convert to a restricted free agent. Speaking of which…

If you haven’t reached the experience threshold to become a UFA, you usually become a restricted free agent. Teams have the option to provide a qualifying offer to players to retain their rights. More experienced RFAs do get arbitration rights, and all RFAs have the option to receive qualifying offers. (Once you file for arbitration, though, you can’t sign a qualifying offer.)

Potential Flames RFAs include Adam Klapka, Brennan Othmann, William Stromgren, Kuznetsov, Arseni Sergeev and Hunter Brzustewicz. All but Brzustewicz would have arbitration rights.

The players with the least leverage in the NHL contract system are what are termed “10.2(c) RFAs,” named after the clause in the CBA that they fall under. These guys, usually late-season college signings, don’t meet the years-of-service threshold to become fully-fledged RFAs. Teams have to tender them qualifying offers to retain their rights, but these players cannot receive offer sheets and don’t have any arbitration rights.

The Flames’ potential 10.2(c) RFAs are Aydar Suniev, Tyson Gross and Abram Wiebe.

We often wonder how the Flames will incorporate all the incoming top prospects going into the 2027-28 season. They do have a lot of players on expiring deals, but most of them are pretty useful players who the Flames might not be in a hurry to move on from.

They have a lot of tough decisions looming on the horizon.