PHILADELPHIA — At first glance, the situation was nothing out of the ordinary. A young prospect — in this case, 22-year-old defenseman and 2020 second-round pick Emil Andrae — was scratched and eventually demoted to the AHL on Friday after failing to maintain his level of play on a consistent enough basis for Philadelphia Flyers coach John Tortorella.
“It has been a little bit of a struggle with the puck, it has been a struggle without the puck,” Tortorella said of Andrae last week. “We’ve got to be careful when we’re developing a guy like that.”
Logistically, reassigning Andrae was the path of least resistance. He was the only defenseman who didn’t require waivers, and the Flyers didn’t have any spare forwards available to replace Sean Couturier, who missed Saturday’s 5-4 overtime win over the Columbus Blue Jackets due to personal reasons. Olle Lycksell, recalled on Saturday to fill in for Couturier, was reassigned on Sunday but will probably return after the Christmas break, as the club needs an extra forward (Nic Deslauriers, who hasn’t played since Nov. 9, is likely out for another month due to injury). Unless the Flyers waive No. 3 goalie Ivan Fedotov or suffer another injury, Andrae is likely to stay with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms for at least a little while.
When it comes to Andrae’s performance, though, the decision to demote him is much more debatable. Andrae settled in on a nice second defense pair with Rasmus Ristolainen, was routinely playing more than 20 minutes a night, and from Nov. 7 to Nov. 30 the Flyers were 8-0-2 with him in the lineup (he was out with a mid-body injury for two games during that stretch, regulation losses to Colorado on Nov. 18 and Carolina on Nov. 20). They’re 11-6-3 overall this season when Andrae dresses; 4-9-1 when he doesn’t.
Beyond the wins and losses, just about all of the advanced metrics publicly available point to a player who was becoming a vital cog, even if he was having some recent ups and downs. Frankly, a case can be made that other than Travis Sanheim and maybe Ristolainen, Andrae had been their best defenseman for about a month and a half before trudging back to Lehigh Valley.
Tortorella can say all he wants about Andrae needing to play better, and he’s not necessarily wrong. Andrae’s game had dipped slightly in mid-December. Further, Andrae getting run over by Columbus’ Mathieu Olivier in a game on Dec. 10 was a reminder that he still needs to work on his on-ice awareness so he doesn’t end up seriously injured. Getting more minutes with the Phantoms certainly isn’t going to hurt him, and also gives him a chance to play on the penalty kill, something he wasn’t doing with the Flyers.
But Tortorella also put Andrae in a difficult position just before the reassignment, healthy scratching him for three straight games before dressing him against the Los Angeles Kings last Thursday in the Flyers’ 7-3 loss. Andrae struggled that night, but he hadn’t played in nine days.
So what’s going on here?
There’s really only one reason a team like the Flyers would reassign a guy like Andrae at this stage of the season. For better or worse, they are still much more intently focused on the ongoing rebuild than they are winning hockey games in the present.
It’s not just the way they handled Andrae, either. Take Cam York. Yes, the young defenseman was having difficulty finding his game after missing more than a month with an upper-body injury, particularly in Flyers losses in Minnesota on Dec. 14 and Detroit on Dec. 18. But York has already cemented himself as a key part of the future. The Flyers are inevitably going to extend the pending restricted free agent, and it’s going to be at a salary much greater than his current $1.6 million.
But instead of letting York play through it, Tortorella had a point to make. He wants to unlock more from York, something he reinforced in his pregame comments on Saturday.
“I do and always will have a ton of respect for him for how he has grown,” he said. “But that’s the jam he’s in right now. He can’t stop. You’re not going to be allowed to go backwards.”
In other words, it’s not that they’re a better team with York out of the lineup, even when he’s scuffling. It’s that he needs to keep progressing if the Flyers are to be the perennial contender they hope to be in a few years.
To be clear, this isn’t necessarily a criticism, unless you’re of the mind that you would like the Flyers to try and go all out to qualify for the playoffs — something that became more difficult last week with three straight losses, coupled with teams like Ottawa and Boston playing much better than they were earlier this season.
Flyers president of hockey operations Keith Jones and general manager Daniel Briere are still in information-gathering mode as they try to decide who should be a part of the club long-term. That means players like Jamie Drysdale, who they acquired at a high price, and Egor Zamula, who is not waiver-exempt, get priority over someone like Andrae at the moment. At this stage of the rebuild, the Flyers are not going to jump through hoops with their roster to try and win games in December.
And both of those defensemen who should arguably be sitting in place of Andrae struggled on Saturday. Drysdale was a minus-3, including misplays on two of Columbus’ goals, while Zamula in one brief stretch airmailed a wide-open point shot 10 feet high and wide of the net and fumbled a clean offensive-zone draw on the power play, forcing the Flyers to clear the zone.
That the fellow left-shot Zamula, especially, is still in the lineup over Andrae is particularly baffling. No logical argument can be made that it makes the Flyers a better team, unless you’re of the mind that dressing York, Andrae and Drysdale in the same game leaves them with too small of a blue line — something Tortorella denied he’s worried about when asked a few weeks ago.
The Flyers seem to have decided that if the end result of Andrae’s reassignment means more losses in the immediate future, well, so be it. In the long term, it might benefit them, particularly if Andrae takes his stint with the Phantoms in stride and returns as a more well-rounded, consistent player.
At the same time, these early roster machinations and lineup decisions could end up costing the Flyers a few months down the road. Points in December, as they say, are just as valuable as points in April. Andrae being in Lehigh Valley will only make grabbing them more difficult.
(Top photo: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
