The Philadelphia Flyers are playing solid hockey — okay, well they most recently collapsed to the feet of the Florida Panthers after overcoming a 3-0 deficit and lost 7-5 — but they are still without some key members to their team due to injury.
On Friday morning, Flyers general manager Danny Briere provided an injury update to the players that are out and hurting: goaltender Sam Ersson, defenseman Jamie Drysdale, and forward Nic Deslauriers.
For Ersson, he appeared to be fully healthy and participating at Flyers practice before the Panthers matchup. Even technically cleared to play. But after not being named on the Flyers roster for Thursday night’s game, questions started to pop up. Well, this makes it a bit clearer.
The goaltender is still on the Injured Reserve list and is considered out day-to-day with his lower-body injury. Either Ersson tweaked something during that practice and he needs just a couple more days until he can take the ice again, or the “being cleared” part was just to participate in practice and his status for playing in actual games was still in question. Whatever it is, we could see Ersson as early as Saturday against the Boston Bruins, or Sunday against the Utah Hockey Club.
Jamie Drysdale has been out with an injury since Nov. 9 and while his official status has been in question and it seems like the Flyers are certainly taking their sweet time putting him back in games, even with him shedding the non-contact sweater weeks ago. While the team probably desperately wants Ersson back as soon as possible — especially after both Ivan Fedotov and Aleksei Kolosov stunk it up against the Panthers — when it comes to Drysdale, the blue line right now is playing the best they have all season long without him. They don’t want to throw that wrench in something that is operating at a high level and then have to decide who comes out (probably Egor Zamula).
The 22-year-old defenseman is also listed out day-to-day, so we could be seeing his return this weekend.
And finally, Nic Deslauriers is apparently out with an injury and is also out day-to-day; and he has joined the other two currently injured Flyers on the Injured Reserve list retroactively to Nov. 9. So, with that month-long IR placement, he could technically join the team at any point.
We’ll just have to wait and see when these guys return.
