Folks, we’re less than two months away from the NHL’s annual trade deadline! And less than a month away from the 4 Nations Face-off!

As such, there’s a lot of thought and discussion these days regarding the future of the Calgary Flames roster – both immediately and in the not-so-near future. In this week’s mailbag, our readers showed their curiosity regarding what could be coming up next in terms of roster movement.

Let’s dive in!

I wrote about this last week: I’m not certain that the Flames will do anything major at the trade deadline. The reason for that is pretty simple: the vibes are good, the team is playing well, and it’s a great environment for the younger players to be in and learn in. After the chaos of the past few years, I think Flames management is pretty content to continue along as-is and not inject undue stress into the locker room unless they get spectacular offers that force them to. I think we could see some tweaks to the team potentially, but nothing terribly substantial or earth-shattering.

If (and I want to emphasize the if, because I don’t think we’re anywhere near this becoming a reality yet) Rasmus Andersson gets traded, I would suspect the return would need to include a first-round pick, an A-level prospect, and a young roster player to even be considered by Flames management as a competitive offer. But at this point, I suspect the Flames would much rather keep Andersson than trade him if given the choice.

As noted, I don’t think the Flames do very much at the trade deadline unless a crazy offer comes in. That said, I suspect they’ll continue to search for a young right shot centre – Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli has recently reported that the Flames are asking around on that type of player, name-dropping Buffalo’s Dylan Cozens – but I don’t think the Flames do anything on that front until the summer. Craig Conroy cut his teeth as a young hockey executive under the tutelage of guys like Brian Burke and Brad Treliving, who both tended to do their major team-building work during the summer.

I really like this question. So there are two potential downsides to sending Andrei Kuzmenko to the minors, and we’ll use the big and small picture to look at things.

Big picture, you potentially send the signal to the marketplace – other players, agents or teams that might want do to business with your team – that you aren’t capable of getting NHL players back to their games without sending them to the minors. There’s a negative connotation for established NHLers being sent to the minors, and so you run the risk of diminishing Kuzmenko as an asset and making it look like your group can’t help get somebody going again when they struggle. (“Oh, so if I sign with them and I have a bad month I’m going to the Wranglers?”) Aside from short-term conditioning stints – which Kuzmenko probably wouldn’t be eligible for – there’s probably a reason NHL teams don’t send struggling older players to the AHL very often.

And conversely, things are working with the Wranglers right now. Their current skid aside, they’re one of the top outfits in the AHL and they’ve found a really great mix of players, styles and personalities that helped the group mesh really nicely. Similarly to how Flames management is probably loathe to mess with the NHL locker room because things are going well, I would suspect they have similar feelings about doing that with their AHL group. You have no idea how a player could react to being demoted – even if you explain the plan to him, even if he goes in with the best intentions – and so keeping Kuzmenko on the NHL roster, with the NHL group and the NHL coaches, could be seen as the best path towards getting him going again.