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The Flyers are at a Point in the Roster Build Where a Gigantic Swing for the Fences is Warranted
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Just before we all shoved off for the holiday weekend, the Flyers put together a five-year, $18 million AAV offer sheet for Anaheim center Leo Carlsson. A blockbuster, huge cajones move.
Here’s the reported breakdown, which is frontloaded and features huge signing bonuses:
There are so many directions to go with this, like a million thoughts popping into your head, but after stewing on it, you’re obviously simplifying this to a Flyers focus. We can’t care what this means for the NHL at large, or the Anaheim Ducks. Sure, there are ramifications that affect their ability to sign Cutter Gauthier, and Danny Briere is trying to leverage Pat Verbeek’s tendency to be a hardass in negotiations, but that’s all less important than the biggest offseason question of them all –
What do the Flyers need to turn the corner, and how do they get it?
Well, they need a 1C, for starters. They’ve needed a 1C as badly as anything.
And how do you get a 1C?
You’re not drafting and developing one, not at this point in the roster build. If the season began today, they’d have an aging Coots, Christian Dvorak, Noah Cates, and presumably Trevor Zegras filling the center depth chart with the glut of wingers being what it is. Same center crop as last year, which can get you back to the second playoff round, but probably not any further. They don’t have a Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, or Leon Draisatl. They haven’t had a truly generational 1C since Eric Lindros was in town.
Leo Carlsson isn’t a generational center, not right now, but he’s on track to be that player very soon. He’s the real deal – 21 years old, almost a point-per-game player this past season despite battling an unusual leg injury, and one of the league’s best young talents. Danny B will make him the highest-paid player in the NHL, which seems overly aggressive, but can you really call this an overpay or a reach when the guy checks a priceless box? If you want players of this caliber, you have to give up a lot to get them, and they finally have the ability to do it after a few painstaking years of cleaning up Chuck Fletcher’s mess.
Alternately, what would you prefer they do? Sit there and wait for a top, unrestricted free agent to become available? That doesn’t happen. These guys largely re-sign with their current teams, and they do it early. This isn’t the NBA when it comes to wheeling and dealing and moving big contracts every offseason. You can try to trade for a center, of course, using the picks the Flyers put into the Carlsson offer sheet. But the options were for the Flyers to wait patiently and ask fans to take a step back with the team, or say “fuck it,” we’re gonna go for it, and that’s what they’re doing in this case, the latter.
Plus, when you’re turning a corner, the hardest player to get is the first one. Look at what the Phillies were before Bryce Harper. They were nothing. Then, after Bryce came Kyle Schwarber and Trea Turner and Nick Castellanos and Zack Wheeler and all of these guys, joining some foundational and less-expensive pieces to complete a squad that would end up going to the World Series. Oftentimes you have to “overpay” to get the first domino to fall, and turn the corner outright, and that’s what the Flyers are thinking here.
Either way, it’s good to see the Flyers really going for it. Maybe it’s the right move, maybe it’s the wrong move, but it’s certainly not boring. They want it bad, and they know the fans do, too.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com