Rumor: Trade between the Blues and Flames could solve the Flames injury woes.

The Calgary Flames have been hit with some rather bad news. 

The Flames were fully expecting that 2017 first round draft selection Juuso Valimaki would be a big factor for them during the 2019 - 2020 National Hockey League regular season, however a major announcement earlier this week snuffed out those hopes in an instant. The Flames announced this week that Valimaki had suffered a major injury during his offseason preparation and on Monday the Flames officially announced that the 20 year old blue liner and suffered a torn ACL. The injury is so severe that the Flames have ruled Valimaki out indefinitely and the expectation is that he will miss the vast majority of the season, if not all of it. 

This now leaves the Flames scrambling for a potential replacement and although they do have some internal options within the organization, Flames general manager Brad Treliving admitted that he would be shopping around in the hopes of bolstering the Flames blue line. The question of course now becomes what type of options are available out there for the Flames? Of course there are some unrestricted free agents out there on the market, players like former Calgary Flames defenseman Dion Phaneuf, however with the Flames current cap situation it seems likely that a trade of some type would be the best possible solution. 

So what teams could be willing to help the Flames? Well in a recent article for The Hockey News Jared Clinton listed some potential options, with one name standing out from the others. Clinton believes that the Flames could target Stanley Cup Champion defenseman Carl Gunnarsson and not only could they target him, but they could be successful in prying him away from the Blues. The Blues are dealing with their own salary cap issues and still have some players like Patrick Maroon on the outside, unsigned, looking in. 

Gunnarsson carries a relatively manageable cap hit of $1.75 million per season and Clinton believes that Blues general manager Doug Armstrong could leverage that contract to pry some assets from the Flames while also potentially shaving some cap space in the process as well. Gunnarsson is coming off a strong showing in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and you could easily argue that he will never carry more value than he does currently as a trading chip. That being said the Blues have to want to get rid of Gunnarsson for this deal to make sense, and no one truly knows how willing Armstrong would be to move him.