With final cuts looming large as the regular season creeps closer, the Flyers have made some preliminary decisions regarding their potential opening night roster.
The updated roster now stands at 28 players, after Jacob Gaucher was sent down to Lehigh Valley soon after the first 11 cuts became official.
Five forwards, four defensemen, and two goalies were returned to the AHL, with most of them being pretty straight-forward subtractions of players that clearly aren’t ready for the NHL roster. Names like Alexis Gendron and Alex Bump had outside shots, but once Tyson Foerster was confirmed to be at full strength, there really wasn’t any more room for another young winger. On the blue line however, there was one name that was jettisoned that, when you look at who stayed, is pretty intriguing.
After failing to make the team out of camp last year, Emil Andrae will once again begin his season in the AHL. While he didn’t make the opening night roster last year either, the 23-year-old Swede did play 42 of his 67 pro games last year with the Flyers and was probably the most called upon non-regular that the Flyers had. Everything seemed to be set up for Andrae to make another push for a full-time role on the bottom pair, but it ultimately has fallen short before it even really got going.
Andrae wasn’t a revelation throughout the preseason, nor was he really outstanding during his time with the Flyers last season. But when you take stock of which Flyers did in fact survive the last round of cuts, it gets a bit more puzzling.
Why cut Andrae and not the others?
While Andrae was sent down, Noah Juulsen, Dennis Gilbert, and Adam Ginning all remain. From a merit standpoint, there really isn’t a reason that these players should remain while Andrae is sent packing. Whether or not you agree that Andrae is a full-time NHL defender, keeping Juulsen and Gilbert, external adds who haven’t really shown anything positive in preseason, over him does say something about what exactly the Flyers and Rick Tocchet are potentially going to prioritize on the third pair.
The only reasons that would have to make sense in order to justify Juulsen and Gilbert, in particular, over Andrae are their size, their status as “veterans” or, in Juulsen’s case, their prior association to the head coach. Juulsen and Gilbert are both 6-foot-2 and north of 200 pounds, whereas Andrae is a slight 5-foot-9 and somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 pounds. Gilbert and Juulsen are both 28 years of age, Andrae is 23, and additionally, Juulsen spent parts of three seasons in Vancouver while Tocchet was head coach.
It seems as if Andrae, who played more NHL games than both Juulsen and Gilbert last season, is falling victim once again to factors that he cannot control. He is a better skater than all of the players he is competing for a spot against, and while that isn’t everything, it does mean quite a bit. And when you look at some of the preseason outings from Juulsen and Ginning in particular, you see more noticeable gaffes, like bad penalties or being forechecked off the puck, than you do with Andrae. There is an argument to be made that a team that already has Cam York and Jamie Drysdale doesn’t need a player like Andrae, but there’s just as good of an argument to be made that a team with Nick Seeler and Egor Zamula doesn’t need Noah Juulsen.
It is hard to shake the feeling that, particularly in the case of Juulsen, that Tocchet is already starting to pick favorites, and going with players that make him feel more at ease. It’s too early to write that in stone, and there’s no guarantee the pecking order doesn’t get shaken up, but it’s concerning if it becomes a trend. And in the case of Andrae individually, it may be time to ask if it is time for him to be moved somewhere else where he can get more fair of a shake in a different situation.
