They were willing to use draft picks to dump Gostisbehere’s contract, but then replaced him with a worse contract (Ristolainen, which required more assets to be given up).īut they were not willing to give up assets to move somebody like a James van Riemsdyk to clear space for Johnny Gaudreau. 101 overall (2022), 2023 second-round pick, 2023 third-round pick, 2024 second-round pick, Gostisbehere, Voracek, Giroux, Hagg, Patrick, Myers.įlyers receive: Atkinson, Ristolainen, Ellis, DeAngelo, Tippett, 2024 first-round pick, 2023 third-round pick. Look at the totality of those moves.įlyers give up: No. But as a collective it is all nonsensical. If you want to try, you might be able to justify each move individually. But then this offseason, they traded three more draft picks (second in 2024, third in 2023, and fourth in 2024) for DeAngelo and paid him $5 million per year over the next two years.Once the season became a dumpster fire, another core player, Claude Giroux, went out the door for Owen Tippett, a 2024 first-round pick, and a 2023 third-round pick. It reduced the team’s salary cap number in the short-term, but Atkinson’s contract goes an extra year. Along with with that, they also traded Jakub Voracek for Cam Atkinson.This could have been a good trade, but Ellis played just four games due to injury and nobody knows when he will return. They also traded Nolan Patrick and Philippe Myers to Nashville for defenseman Ryan Ellis.14 overall), a 2023 second-round pick (which will probably be very high), and Robert Hagg to the Buffalo Sabres for Ristolainen. Then they traded their 2021 first-round pick (No.36 overall) and a seventh-round pick simply to get rid of Shayne Gostisbehere‘s contract. Last summer they traded a second-round pick (which turned out to be No.Let’s look at some of the most prominent roster moves over the past year. The asset management here just does not make any sense. That is where things truly become baffling with this team. What has to make it even more frustrating for Flyers fans is that they could not make an effort to go for a difference-maker and bonafide superstar because they are paying players like Rasmus Ristolainen and Tony DeAngelo a combined $10 million in salary cap space. In other words, they could not (or did not want) to do the “aggressive” part of the “aggressive retool.”
General manager Chuck Fletcher basically came out and said they did not pursuit Gaudreau because their salary cap situation did not allow it, and that it would have been difficult to move out the necessary contracts to create salary cap space for him.
A MESS O TROUBLE BUBBLE FREE
That set pretty high expectations, and made the Flyers a potential landing spot for unrestricted free agent Johnny Gaudreau, or some other major addition.īut as we learned over the past couple of days the Flyers never actually made a push for Gaudreau. The words “aggressive retool” and “blank check” were thrown around. Īs that mess of a season was unfolding, management talked a big game about how they were going to fix this. It was, by every objective measure, an awful team with holes and question marks all over the roster.
They are coming off of a 2021-22 season where they were not only one of the worst teams in the league, but also finished with the second-worst points percentage (.372) in franchise history. And how else is there to explain the Flyers’ current situation? They have spent the past 10 years tumbling through perpetual mediocrity, missing the playoffs six times, finishing higher than third place in the division just once, and winning only a single playoff round (against a 24th ranked team in the league in the expanded playoff bubble). But when you are in that latter group of teams, the fun simply gets sucked out of sports. You know what to expect in the short-term and can adjust your expectations accordingly. The first two groups of teams are pretty easy to accept as a fan. There are also teams in the NHL that know they are not very good, need to tear things down to the foundation and aggressively rip things apart for future assets.Īnd then there are teams like the Philadelphia Flyers - a team that seems to have no idea what they are and what direction they need to go in. There are teams in the NHL that know they are Stanley Cup contenders and know exactly what to do to make themselves better.
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