Chris Pronger Injury: So Uh... How Are The Flyers Replacing Him?

The downside of the Walker move is that he can’t come up without going through re-entry waivers, and if someone decided he was worth a $850k cap hit then the Flyers would be screwed — they just don’t have room for another $850k of dead space in addition to the $1.4M of bonus penalties from last year.

So at that point, Walker and Bartulis are both stuck in the AHL because you can’t expose them to re-entry waivers. By not foreseeing this possibility and appreciating the value of having Bartulis’ $600k salary over Walker’s $1.7M, they would have jammed themselves into a corner where they have to rely on the Phantoms to fill out the roster for the rest of the year.

When Pronger came back in this scenario, Marshall would presumably go back to the AHL and Gus would stay as the #6/7. Which means either he’s in the lineup and better be ready (in which case why was Walker in there to begin with) or he’s on the bench and having his development stunted.

It made it awkward for me to cheer for him when I was at the St Louis game.

No St. Cloud State = pure awesomeness.

At this point, keeping him up would mean his contract ends the same year Claude Giroux, Brayden Schenn, Matt Read, and Andrea Meszaros are looking for contract extensions.

Sending him down, so that his contract is extended a year, means we dont have to worry about resigning him at a higher cost until Claude Giroux is successfully locked up, and the situations for Schenn, Read, and Meszaros are figured out. That would push the Couturier resigning to the same year Briere comes off the books. At that point Briere would be 37, and possibly looking at retirement.

Flyers would already have Giroux locked as their top center, possibly Schenn as well, which would put them in a good spot for bargaining with Couturier, and give them 6 mil in cap space to play with.

Regardless of how Couturier is now, and I like him and how he’s played, we’d be pushed to sign 3 centers in the same year if we dont send him down to extend his contract. I dont know, is this good or bad? We’d have 3 centers bidding against each other on the one hand. On the other hand, we’d have 2 centers, and then 1 center, with 6 million in free cap space.

Pretty sure the Caps have done it several times. I could be wrong, of course.

I think they’ve also done it in reverse – sent a guy “down” on paper, but kept him with the team physically. Primary reason is to squirrel away cap space when you’re banking it, if I recall correctly.

Once a player stays for an 11th game, one year of his deal automatically counts as having been exercised on his three-year NHL entry level contract.

"There is no reason to," the source said. "He can learn just as easily here on the job."

Aside from the 10th/11th game question, these quotes are right in line with the idea of the team seeking to acquire talent and overcome the cap rather than manage the cap efficiently.

also cumulative fatigue usually results when tendons, repeatedly exposed to mechanical stress, temporarily lose their elasticity. A player can feel rested but have a dead arm in the case of pitchers or in hockey, I’m assuming “lead legs”. I don’t think they have played enough for that to have happened.

So you mean it reduces the likelihood of major and minor injuries but doesn’t increase energy levels?

ah, gotcha

Yeah, though it does include a repeated error: not sure why I listed his ELC as 1.4M; should say 1.7M, since the most widespread guess is 1.69 or 1.705M these days.

a typical 18 year old would be in the minors.

out of 18 year olds, I think what… 3 are currently in the NHL rosters of teams?

Basically weaken the team now so we can save 1 million bucks on the cap in the year 2015.

I don’t think you read my comment correctly.

If he is the kind of elite talent who is a substantial improvement over replacement at the age of 18, then playing him now will not cost them $1M in 2015; it will cost them almost $1M this year plus $3M in 2014-15 plus $1.5M in 2018-19.

If he turns out not to be that kind of elite talent — and keep in mind that an awful lot of highly rated prospects aren’t — then playing him now will cost them almost $1M this year and weaken the team.

as proven by your Zone Entry posts

I don’t think you read my post correctly either. Allow me to repeat a couple of passages:

we don’t have enough information yet to infer their talent levels or make predictions about their long-term results

The sample sizes are not yet large enough for the conclusions above to be taken as anything other than a description of what has happened so far

While the sample size is small, it is clear that thus far this group has been strong enough defensively to provide a net boost to the team despite failing to generate offense.

Please understand that a) he hasn’t proven anything yet, and b) for him to be worth the $1M + $3M + $1.5M cost of playing this year, he’ll need to be capable of doing more than playing strong defense against bottom-tier competition.

He almost didn’t miss that pass cooter sent his way!

Certain people around here would consider a lot of things to make that happen…