The Flyers made a big shift to their roster, they announced yesterday, with the move to ship out backup goaltender Sam Ersson and depth defenseman Emil Andrae (along with a third round pick) to Toronto in exchange for Joseph Woll and Simon Benoit. And while the shift in the goaltending situation — the extra stability that Woll can provide them over what Ersson has been able to provide, of late — is certainly the biggest boost and takeaway from this move, but the broader shakeup of the defense group makes for an underrated tidy bit of business.
How the pieces fall
There might well be more moves on the horizon (more on that later), but as it stands, the places and roles on the Flyers’ back end are reasonably well defined. The roles that these players ended this past season in shouldn’t shift too dramatically, so we can roughly picture the group heading into next season lining up something like this:
Travis Sanheim – Rasmus Ristolainen
Cam York – Jamie Drysdale
Nick Seeler – David Jiricek*
Simon Benoit
While Benoit certainly offers a different stylistic option for the Flyers down in their lineup, his presence doesn’t overly change to look of the overall group. That is, he more or less slides in as a guy who can rotate in on the left side but isn’t especially well positioned to unseat someone like Nick Seeler — who has dropped off a bit in his play with age, but is still broadly effective in his role and has the experience banked with the team to keep his spot, when healthy, out of jeopardy — and sets up a different kind of platoon.
Benoit comes in as something of a perfect seventh defenseman, providing some useful built-in depth and a bit more size to bolster things a bit more, if need be, but barring some further move to shake up the defense, on the outside waiting the call he will remain.
What it opens up
This is all to say that even more valuable than what Benoit brings from an on-ice stance is the space that he opens up elsewhere in the lineup. In him, the Flyers get a defense-first, more veteran leaning player to fill the Noah Juulsen role — a player who provides some stability in theory, and who the coaching staff should like to have around but, as Juulsen also provides an example for, they shouldn’t fall in love with so much as to push a younger, developing player out of the lineup entirely — for this next season. And the fact that he slots into that role, but this time on the left side, opens up a space on the right side of the lineup for perhaps an Oliver Bonk, but more likely a David Jiricek (who, we recall, can be safely penciled in on the opening night roster due to his new need to pass through waivers to be assigned to the Phantoms).
Andrae is certainly a player with more upside, and in some ways it stings to move on from him in exchange for a lower ceiling replacement, but with a number of even younger prospects on the way who present as even higher upside, and who need minutes in short order, the Flyers needed to find a way to clear up space somehow. Benoit’s particular game will earn him some respect, but there’s an implicit understanding that he’s not a player that needs to be in the lineup absolutely every night, as was the sense with Juulsen this past season. The ripples of the addition might not be truly massive, but it gives them the opportunity to keep graduating their developing defenders up from the AHL.
More to come?
There’s certainly an arrangement in all of this that could work for everyone, but the bit lingering at the back of the mind is the knowledge that for the good it does elsewhere, this move doesn’t address one of the biggest needs of the offseason — to find a way to fix the struggling power play. It’s no secret that there remains something fundamentally broken with the power play, and the team has alluded particularly to their need to find a defenseman to effectively run it from the point as, if nothing else, the first step towards unlocking the units’ full potential. Benoit certainly offers them some things, but a fix for the power play is not one of them.
Maybe the hope is that Jiricek can step into that role — he did show some real promise in the AHL, giving the Phantoms a nice bit of extra pop on the man-advantage — and that would make for the best-case scenario, but it’s far from a certainty that he can stick in that role, and as such, it does feel strange to imagine that the Flyers would head into next season with that as their only option in the back pocket. So whether this means a move to bring in a big name like they’ve been linked to in the rumor mill — John Carlson or Darnell Nurse, for example — or someone out of left field (and sending another member of the current group off, in turn), that’s yet to be seen, but no matter how you slice it, the sense remains the same — the Flyers took case of a nice bit of business with this trade, but their work seems far from done, still.
