The pieces in the Flyers’ lineup look, at long last, like they’re beginning to come together. Through the end of the preseason and into these first couple of games of the regular season, they’ve gotten stable performances from both parts of their goaltending tandem, while with some shuffling of their forward lines up front, some early chemistry in those lines is beginning to emerge, as they get closer to finding the best mix. That optimal mix on defense, though, has proved a little more elusive, and with the absence of Cam York stretching out a little longer, desperation time has begun to creep up to find a group and an arrangement that can help more effectively keep them afloat.
The ask has been relatively simple — “we’re looking for somebody to make a statement on defense,” head coach Rick Tocchet told reporters pregame — but while that’s still seemed at times a high bar to clear for some playing down in their lineup, Emil Andrae delivered exactly that, a statement performance, in his first game up with the team after this weekend’s recall.
Andrae didn’t have a ton of ice time to work with in this season debut, with just 10:22 logged — and the high volume of penalties taken (five minor penalties on each side) surely didn’t help this distribution of minutes, as he was kept to an exclusively 5-on-5 usage — but he did all that he could to make an impression on each shift and carry his momentum over across the whole span of the night.
The situation a player recently called up to play a depth role on the NHL team finds himself in can be a challenging one, and it might be easy for a player like that to slip into a mode of straying from their best game and into what they think would be expected in that particular role, but Andrae did well to avoid that slippage and keep to playing his truest game. His game is, that is, at its best when he’s able to play assertively, stepping up as a key player in transition, helping to keep control on the cycle, and even jumping in offensively as the spaces open up, and that’s exactly the game he delivered last night.
Emil Andrae had multiple good breakout plays like this and other good offensive pinches tonight in just 10:22 of TOI.
— Flyers Clips (@Flyers_Clips) October 14, 2025
Zamula should be less than an afterthought at this point. The new search should be for a D partner for Emil Andrae.#LetsGoFlyers pic.twitter.com/8oyDkAkRi1
Andrae’s transition game was a major standout, and he was able to flash it both with a few crisp, unpanicked breakout passes, as well as a few nice sequences of carrying the puck up ice end to end himself. These were some of the flashier plays, but there was a notable attention to detail that he maintained as well — he made a couple of positive plays to break up passing lanes with a more subtle quick stick — and he was also able to flex a level of physical strength in his game which seems to be on the underrated side. It wasn’t a game full to the brim of highlight reel plays for him — though that was the type of game he was coming off of, in his season debut with the Phantoms on Saturday — but it saw him taking care of the responsible plays that he needed to, showing a level of confidence to suggest that he was able to allow the early demotion to roll off his shoulders, and, perhaps the most critically, slid in as something of a stabilizing force playing alongside Noah Juulsen (whose play, we well know, has been a little more suspect up to this point).
“That was a tough situation for him,” Tocchet acknowledged after the game, “to come in for his first game [after] going down to the minors and coming back up, but I thought he did a really nice job. Give the kid a lot of credit”
All in all, there’s not much more complete of a game that a coaching staff could hope to see from a depth defenseman in his season debut. And while he came into this stint with the question looming of whether the fate of this NHL stint rests in York’s recovery timeline, with a showing such as he brought last night, Andrae did some major heavy lifting to shift that fate back into his own hands. If he keeps playing the way he did last night, size concerns and all, it’s going to be hard indeed for the Flyers to justify taking him out of the lineup.
