The Flyers knocked out a bit more business this afternoon, announcing that at today’s deadline, they’ve given a qualifying offer to Cam York, but left Jakob Pelletier, Elliot Desnoyers, and Zayde Wisdom unsigned.
And, for the most part, there aren’t really any major surprises here. York was always going to be getting an offer — especially as the rumors are swirling that things are again moving in the right direction in the contract extension talks with his camp — and there was no question that he’s a player that was going to be sticking around.
On the flip side, though, the others seem to have fallen victim to the numbers game. Pelletier’s situation has been a bit of a strange one — he clearly fell out of favor in the Flames’ organization and hoped to rebuild his stock with the Flyers, the bit (but not overwhelming amount) of flash combined with the report that there was a bit of a stalemate hit with his representation, the fit more or less disintegrated on them.
Desnoyers, who showed a ton of promise in his first season with the Phantoms but hasn’t been able to replicate that in the two seasons since. Now, his rookie year production was probably never going to be sustainable (shooting at 18 percent over a season is a doozy), outside of flashes of positive momentum, these last two seasons have seen him more often looking lost in the mix at this level, despite opportunities to figure it out both on the wing and down the middle. Now, he’s still just 23 and there’s a bit more developmental runway ahead of him, so we hope for him that a change of scenery could serve him well and allow him to find his game again, but the Flyers have a lot of guys coming to join the Phantoms this season, and there was a need to clear up some space. This same logjam hit Wisdom too, and his being left to walk was the one surprise — he put in some really tremendous work over this past season to both rebuild his game at the AHL level and to make himself a driver for the team down the stretch and into the postseason, but in the end it turned out not to be enough to earn that NHL deal. He might be one we see brought back on an AHL deal, who knows, but we wouldn’t be surprised to test his luck elsewhere as well.
Now, with those York who had received his qualifying offer, there’s still some work left to do to get that contract set and finalized, but it’s the first step in keeping that process going, and we’ll see how things shake out from here.
