The Flyers seemed to suffer another blow in the injury department last night in their win over the Sabres, as they lost Cam York to what was clarified post-game as an upper body injury in the second period. York got hit up high towards the middle of the frame and stayed in the game long enough to get involved in the scrum which ensued after Trevor Zegras got pasted into the board by Rasmus Dahlin with about three minutes to go, but this would be his final shift.
The Flyers weren’t able to immediately provide an update on his status as far as any anticipation to miss time on his part is concerned, but after the Flyers lost Tyson Foerster long-term earlier this same week, it’s hard not to slip down the rabbit hole of wondering how the Flyers will manage to overcome the loss of one of their top defenders along with one of their top defensive forwards in the same week.
All told, though, if York is set to miss any length of time — and perhaps the silver lining here is that they have some insulation here, with no games on the schedule until Sunday — the Flyers have options on players to pull into the lineup for support.
Noah Juulsen
Of course, Juulsen isn’t a direct replacement for York, both in where he plays in the lineup and what he offers in his game broadly, but if it turns out that the Flyers don’t think they’re going to be without York for the long haul, their move might be to not make a move at all, and instead run with a defense arrangement resembling the one they went with when York was out short-term earlier this season. That is, this meant elevating Nick Seeler to play on the top pair with Travis Sanheim, and then filling out the bottom two pair with who’s left — at the time, it was Adam Ginning playing with Jamie Drysdale and Juulsen sliding in beside Egor Zamula on the bottom pair, and this time around could see that third pair reunited, and the effective pairing of Emil Andrae and Jamie Drysdale left alone for the time being.
Now, this isn’t a third pair which looked great together, and that’s something to be aware of, but it could work well enough as a stopgap if York’s absence is truly going to be short.
Adam Ginning
The equation is similar if the Flyers want to make a smaller move to continue tinkering on the edges of this defensive lineup. The first time York was out, Ginning was called upon to help support the team, and despite the fact that he was only just waived and assigned back down to the Phantoms, this might just be a route they look to go down again. How viable this option is over the medium to long term really hinges on how successfully a top pairing of Seeler and Sanheim works together — if they click, then it’s only the third pair that they have to worry about, and they can work out some kind of rotation between Ginning and Zamua to play alongside Juulsen, the competition for that final spot in the lineup could be opened up between those two again.
This is an avenue which, all in all, does make it particularly well apparent just how difficult it is to replace York’s impacts in this lineup, but they have to make do with what they have.
Christian Kyrou
The most exciting among this group, of course, would be Christian Kyrou. With 12 games now under his belt with the Phantoms after the trade which saw him swapped with forward Samu Tuomaala back in October, Kyrou has been on an absolute tear with his new team. With four goals and 14 points in those 12 games, he’s shot up to sixth in points among all of his teammates, and cleared all of the other defensemen on the team comfortably (the next player behind him is Helge Grans with five points on the season). Kyrou’s production has certainly been eye-catching, but he’s been bringing along with it an otherwise quite well-balanced game. He’s been quite steady in his defending on the whole, and he’s stepped up in a big way as a puck mover, fitting seamlessly into this transition heavy new system.
Kyrou is young, still just 22 years old, and has not yet made his debut into the NHL, but this could be a good opportunity for the Flyers to offer him that debut, and get a real chance to see more of what they have in him, a chance that would otherwise be hard to come by. That is, while there seemed to be some concerns early in the season on the part of the coaching staff that running a defense group with all of York, Andrae, and Drysdale in the lineup at the same time would skew the group too small, they’ve put in some good work to prove that this isn’t the case. However, taking this group and adding another undersized defender (Kyrou is listed at 5’11 and 165 pounds), that would legitimately take the collective size of the group into concerning territory. But now, with one undersized defenseman out, this could be a perfect opportunity to slide another into his place, effectively.
Now, getting Kyrou into the lineup would necessitate a little more shuffling of the other pieces — namely, if they wanted to immediately throw him into the deep end with high usage, they could move Sanheim back over to the left side and put Kyrou beside him in an attempt to replicate the pair with York as closely as possible, but if throwing a rookie into that role seems a little too rich for them, they’d be looking at something like moving Andrae up onto the top pair, sliding Zamula in with Drysdale, and leaving Kyrou with the more responsible Seeler (as pairing him with Seeler would also effectively replicate stylistically what they’re running down in Lehigh Valley with his pairing with Ty Murchison). It’s a little clunkier, but if there’s the runway to experiment a little bit, it’s hard to argue that it’s not even worth trying.
All told, though, this situation is a tough one. Unlike with the forward mix and the options to come in to replace Foerster, the options are there but not quite as broad, and none feel quite as seamless. It’s a function of the pieces that the Flyers have in their mix on the back end up and down the organizational ladder, but also a testament to how valuable York has made himself to this squad, that he can’t be so easily replaced. And for this reason, the hope above all hope is that his absence, if any, is not long lasting.
