The Philadelphia Flyers made a little transaction late Tuesday night, moving injured center Noah Cates to Injured Reserve and calling up fellow young forward Olle Lycksell to take a spot on the roster.
Last week it was revealed that Cates will be out for the foreseeable future — roughly six to eight weeks — with a lower-body injury but due to the Flyers not needing financial assistance to really shuffle around the lineup, and already having an extra forward, they have managed until now. Since Cates went down, the Flyers have played three games, two of them at home and the other one just at the other end of the state in Pittsburgh. Having exactly 12 forwards is fine when any emergency call-up is just a drive away, but now they will need help.
The Flyers are heading out on a three-game road trip to Arizona, Colorado, and Nashville — places just a little bit farther from Allentown than they were. With this in mind, they grabbed Lycksell as the extra skater.
It’s not clear as to whether the 24-year-old Swede will be getting in the lineup, but he has certainly deserved some sort of reward for what he has down with the Phantoms this season. Currently, he’s Lehigh Valley’s leading scorer with 19 points and has at least double the amount of goals than anyone else on the entire team, with 12 scored in 21 games.
The one thing we can count on is head coach John Tortorella wanting to rotate in some of the younger players, and if he wants to do that with Lycksell, then it certainly makes sense for him to see some action in the next couple of games. If they didn’t want him to play, then they could have easily just recalled Tanner Laczynski or Adam Brooks, other centers who are older and might be happy to just get some NHL practicing in on the road. The only knock against that theory is that Lycksell doesn’t require waivers to be sent back down, so if Flyers management really didn’t want to risk losing anyone (even depth players like Laczynski and Brooks), then Lycksell is the call to make to just be on the road in case a forward goes down.
It would be certainly nice to see Lycksell on the ice. He got a cup of coffee last season, playing eight games and earning on single assist during that time, but he appears to have found more of a rhythm in now his second season playing in North America.
