I really don’t think he goes anywhere. Losing his salary puts the Flames way under the cap floor and it’s not like UFAs are dying to play there. They need his salary.
Nah. Lots of reasons he won't be traded, but risk of the salary floor isn't one of them.
Let's just say quickly if that was a concern, having too much cap space wouldn't be a problem hard to fix. Teams are buying out players, trading cap-dumps, and worst case scenario is you see if Pronger still has a contract.
But realistically the trade itself would likely have salary coming back to Calgary.
If it didn't, then they have roughly 12M to reach the floor. They need to sign a
second pairing, whether that includes Kylington or not, and that's already likely to take up half of that 12M even in rebuild mode. And again if they are looking to get above the floor, they could offer a 1 year can't-say-no contract to the likes of Barrie, Klingberg, Schmidt and friends. Gives them the best opportunity to show what they got on a team with no depth to be concerned with while vying for a future multi-year contact. And not all that dissimilar to Dumba and Gostisbehere signing one year contracts with Arizona and Detroit last year.
If they go with Vladar and Wolf, which I'm not sure is the only intention, they still need to sign Wolf and depending on term that could reach upwards of 2M (especially if they are willing to bank on him).
So now you have about 4M for 3 forwards. But these aren't just depth forwards, they need to replace Mangiapane and Kadri. While the top UFAs might not be putting Calgary on the top of their list, there's going to be a UFA or two who will be happy to sign with the Flames for a couple million.