Keith Yandle’s NHL-record of 989 straight games came to an end on Saturday night when he was a healthy scratch in a 6-3 loss to Toronto.

The decision to sit the veteran defenseman was met with a Sharknado of social media opinion, with Jeremy Roenick dropping this take:

More Roenick:

What free agent would ever wanna play for Mike Yeo now? The team is trying to rebuild and you pull a move like this… truly unbelievable! Im very disappointed to be a Flyers fan right now!

I get where Roenick is coming from. There was a lot of that on Twitter, the thought that the Flyers were dicking Yandle over after making it this far. You totally stink as a team, and you’ve only got 15 games left, so why not bite the bullet and let the guy finish it out, get him to the 1,000 mark, and then he moves on and that’s the end? If you take that stance, you can make a reasonable argument for it.

However, here are some other things we can say about the Yandle situation:

  1. He has been terrible this year. -39 on the ice. Does the Ironman streak count if you are horrendous for a portion of it?
  2. The Flyers didn’t owe Yandle shit, and if it wasn’t for the record, he would have been benched a long time ago. The Philadelphia organ-eye-zation should actually be commended for allowing him to stay on the ice as long as they did.
  3. Playing Yandle up until this point ensures that Phil Kessel won’t catch him until next season. I’m not sure if that means anything in the grand scheme of things, since Kessel was likely going to eclipse him regardless, but if you’re into symbolic gestures, the Flyers at least created a situation where Yandle sits on top for a while.
  4. For the early part of the season, there wasn’t anybody worth scratching Yandle for. You want more Kevin Connauton? Ronnie Attard + Cam York wasn’t a thing back then.
  5. Do Flyers fans give a shit about Yandle being scratched, or is it the NHL community at large crying foul? It seems to be mostly the latter.
  6. The Flyers could have waived Yandle after he got the streak and it would have been justified. They did more than was required of them. Plus, dude was in his first year here. It’s not like Yandle was a long-tenured fan favorite. If they scratched Bill Barber in this fashion, then it’s a different story.

A lot of the discourse here seems to surround the timing of the move. If they did this two months ago, there wasn’t a prospect worth calling up, so they’d be waiving him for another mediocre veteran to play, right? But instead of making him a healthy scratch, they could have just waived him this week when they had a few days off in a row, which may have be received better from a PR/optics perspective. They could have easily just said that it was time to get their defensive prospects on the ice.

This really is a case study in how things are not black and white. More than one thing can be true. The Flyers could have let Keith Yandle finish out this pointless shitburger of a season, as Roenick suggests. I honestly don’t think Jeremy is wrong, because his take of “you’ve already come this far” is a valid one. But at the same time, Yandle was a net negative on the ice and these young prospects need NHL time, because it’s not about handing out games for charity, it’s about winning, especially when you haven’t done much of that over the past decade.

EDIT – I think this is a good take: