Flames ranked 11th in Daily Faceoff’s salary cap management rundown

Folks, hockey is a multi-faceted game. But since the introduction of the salary cap in 2005-06, it’s also a numbers game. The ability to effectively manage the salary cap can determine whether an NHL club can put a good team on the ice or not.

Over at Daily Faceoff, Scott Maxwell is in the process of unveiling his annual NHL team salary cap rankings. Earlier this week, he unveiled the 16th through 9th-best teams at managing the salary cap. Among them? The Calgary Flames, who clocked in at 11th in the league.

Maxwell’s rankings assess teams’ cap situations across five categories, and then aggregates their ratings across those categories. The five categories are Contract Rating (in short: how closely linked a player’s cap structure is to their performances), Contracts with No-Trade/No-Move Clauses, Dead Cap Space, Quality of Core, and their Cap Space to Skill Differential.

Here’s what Maxwell had to say about the Flames:

Contract Rating: 18th
Contracts with No-Trade/No-Move Clauses: t-5th
Dead Cap Space: t-20th
Quality of Core: 26th
Cap Space to Skill Differential: 3rd

The Flames are an interesting team to evaluate for their salary cap situation. On one hand, they have a young core that seems to be growing, and they’ve been very smart in investing in that core with excellent contracts handed out to Matt Coronato, Connor Zary and Dustin Wolf this summer. Calgary also doesn’t have a lot of players with clauses, which will come in handy if they aren’t quite as strong as last season and need to sell off some assets, and still have plenty of salary cap space if they are as good and want to add at the deadline.

But then Calgary also still has their fair share of blemishes to deal with. The most obvious one is the Jonathan Huberdeau contract, which still has six years left on it. On top of that, my model doesn’t love the extensions handed out to Yegor Sharangovich and Kevin Bahl, although it’s easy to see both of those improve down the road. And while the Flames do have a good young core locked up long term, that isn’t exactly reflected in their quality of core with those aforementioned contracts weighing it down.

Yeah, the Flames do have a few veterans over 30 with hefty deals like Jonathan Huberdeau ($10.5 million through 2030-31), Nazem Kadri ($7 million through 2028-29) and MacKenzie Weegar ($6.25 million through 2030-31). But despite that, they have a ton of salary cap flexibility this season and going forward, and several younger players locked up to pretty decent deals.

In terms of clauses, via PuckPedia there are seven players with active clauses: Huberdeau (full no-move), Kadri (full no-move), Mikael Backlund (full no-move), Yegor Sharangovich (10-team no-trade), Blake Coleman (10-team trade list), Rasmus Andersson (6-team no-trade) and Weegar (full no-trade).

Are the Flames in an ideal cap situation? Perhaps not. But they have a lot of flexibility and, as Maxwell’s league-wide snapshot indicates, they’re fairly well-situation relative to the rest of the league cap-wise as they proceed with their retooling process.