Quoting: mokumboi
To be fair, the Fiala case is another one where the team was under extreme cap duress thanks to their own stupidity. Just not as stupid as Vegas and for a much younger player.
To piggyback on that thought, and just basing this off of what CF has on the front page right now (meaning that some contract details are not 100% confirmed right now so this could be out of date in an hour):
Vancouver currently has $85.251M in contracts committed for next year, and even after they put Michael Ferland on LTIR they'll still only have ~$700K cleared under the cap (and won't be accruing cap space since they're using LTIR to go over $82.5M.) They're not in the same cap squeeze that Minnesota or Vegas is in, necessarily, but when you look at their cap space next summer it becomes obvious that there's no home for JT Miller. I still think it's more likely he's a deadline deal, but Vancouver could breathe a lot easier without him.
Columbus is pretty snug too - they've got $3.17M in cap space right now with Emil Bemstrom and Patrik Laine needing new deals. At this point, they *could* trade Gustav Nyquist and raise that cap space to a little less than $8.7M, but I still don't think that's enough to even bridge both those guys.
St. Louis is probably at least *pushing* the cap - but looking at their roster, they probably want to move someone on D before they move Tarasenko. 7 guys already signed with Perunovich and Mikkola's RFA rights (tho I heard Scott had signed already?) so they've got a bit of a logjam. Maybe Isles sweeten a potential Tarasenko deal by taking Scandella off your hands?