Trade deadline isn't until March 5 this year because of the Olympics, so there's a lot of time to figure out if the young guys can step up or if they need to look outside the organization.
I did a little digging on Capgeek and of the Providence D prospects (Miller, Warsofsky, Trotman, Morrow, Cross, Casto in descending order of likelihood to be called up), Miller is the only one who isn't exempt from waivers. This is because he was 23 when he signed his first contract, 24 for the purposes of waiver eligibility, so he was only exempt for 2 years. He had already passed through waivers in October to go to Providence in the first place, so playing 10 NHL games would have triggered another set of waivers for him to go back down. Everyone else has enough waiver exemption left to get an extended tryout without being limited to 9 games to protect them from waivers.
They have $13,187,500 in cap space for next season right now, including Savard's LTIR. They're right up against the cap this year just in base salaries and have $5.6M above and beyond that between Iginla ($4.2M), Krug ($0.7875) and Hamilton ($0.6). While some of those aren't going to be attained, most if not all of Iginla's are games played based and he's already earned $3.7M for playing in 10 games. So call it $5M in bonus overage coming off of next year's cap. That's down to $8.1875M in cap space. Smith and Krug are RFAs that need raises, that's a minimum of $5M between the two of them IMO, leaves you at $3.1875M. That's to sign a backup goalie, 7th D, and a top 9 wing (third line if you go with Eriksson on the first line and Smith on the second). Even qualifying Svedberg and Bartkowski/Miller for bench slots that leaves you pretty short up against it.
Yes the cap is taking a big chump, but the flat year this year forced Chiarelli to get creative and use next year's cap space to sign Iginla for this year. That doesn't leave them with nearly as much wiggle room as people believe.
