Rasmus Ristolainen’s name has been splattered all over every single NHL trade board months before the March 7 deadline. The Philadelphia Flyers defenseman has been rumored to be on the block and potentially moved mid-season, but general manager Danny Briere isn’t necessarily working the phones to ship him out.
When asked specifically about the blueliner being potentially dealt in the middle of this season, Briere was not willing to make it a foregone conclusion.
“I don’t know yet. There’s been teams that have called to inquire. But Ristolainen has been so good for us too, and he’s not a rental,” Briere said at his midseason press conference on Tuesday. “For us, there’s no rush to trade him. We finally have him healthy. We finally have him playing extremely well. To find a right-shot defenseman like that; to play in your top four, to play as physical as he does, they’re tough to find. We have him here for us. We get excited thinking about trading him and what kind of return we could get, but I’m not shopping him. I’m not trying to get rid of him.
“He’s a big asset for us and it would be a big hole for us if we were to lose him. So, I really don’t know where it’s going but I can tell you I’m not shopping him. I did receive some calls on him, though.”
Ristolainen is under contract for two more season after this one at a fairly reasonable $5.1-million AAV — reasonable in the sense that he is a top-four defenseman for the Flyers right now. Like Briere said himself, there is technically no rush to trade him. The only positive to it would be truly starting to lose some more games (if you want them to sink down for higher draft lottery odds) and the acquiring team getting potentially three playoff runs with him on their blue line instead of just two, if he were to be dealt this summer.
As of Tuesday, before they face the Detroit Red Wings, the Flyers are just four points out of the second Wild Card spot. With that in mind, trading a player that is under contract for more than just this season would be raising the white flag on the season and Briere most certainly does not want to do that. Or at least publicly mention that he is open to doing that as his team is in the middle of a race for the postseason.
The one comparison we can make is the Flyers decision to move pending unrestricted free agent blueliner Sean Walker at last year’s trade deadline. It was technically easier to move him as a rental to the Colorado Avalanche, but just days before the eventual trade, reports were that Briere was still open to the possibility of signing him to a contract extension. We know that we will never really see any trade happening before it happens, so this could be Briere just easing the waters before his actual decision is made. Of course he wasn’t going to say anything concrete in January.
If the Flyers were to move Ristolainen, determining his replacement for the rest of the season would prove to be fairly difficult if the team is still fighting for the Wild Card, as Briere mentioned. As for right-handed defenseman in the Flyers organization, it would either be Erik Johnson playing regularly for the rest of the year, or someone like Helge Grans coming up from the AHL and potentially rushing through his development — which is something the Flyers certainly do not want to do.
With how well Ristolainen is performing on the ice, trading him in the middle of the season could easily be taken as Flyers management deciding that the results do not ultimately matter. Which could prove to be dangerous especially when the trade could certainly wait until the draft floor in June and not have as large as an effect on the roster.
If a team decides to pony up and offer a top prospect or a first-round pick with no salary retention, then Briere will most likely be fine taking that price for the mid-season risk. But if not, we should maybe be preparing ourselves to see Rasmus Ristolainen remain in the Orange and Black on March 8.