Philly's Mess Catches Up With Them

Richards, Carter. Gone, gone.

This good news for the Habs is ostensibly bad news for the Flyers and their fans. Richards and Carter were a big part of the Flyers success and a huge reason the team ever got close to a Stanley Cup without a goalie.

But that's where it all goes wrong isn't it?

Without a goalie.

For most teams, not having a good goalie is a problem. For Philadelphia it's a brain-devouring complex. That's why instead of applying a bit of patience and recognizing what a good thing they may have pulled from thin air in Bobrovsky, they went out and did what they always did and signed, signed, signed.

Bryzgalov is a good goalie, don't get me wrong. I like him, I like his chances in Philly. But you will note that Anaheim let him go, that Phoenix let him go, that Phoenix doesn't have any Cups.

A goalie simply can't do it all. Let me rephrase that, a goalie not named Thomas or Hasek can't do it all. A team needs to put talent at all positions and use their salary allowance wisely to do that.


Philly's real problems

A lot of articles on yesterday's trades say things like "Holmgren managed to unload Carter's long-term contract/Richards salary cap millstone".

I think these comments are way off the mark. Both players were paid in the $5 million range and both performed to the level of their salary, which in the world of guys paid that much means they were bargains.

What's more, the salary cap hasn't been going anywhere but up, even through the worst financial period in modern US/Canadian history. As the proportion that a $5 million salary takes up shrinks, the better a long-term deal for a producing player paid at that level looks.

Saying nothing about intangibles at all, I can firmly say that Richards and Carter were not the salary cap problems in Philadelphia. If anything, they were among the contracts that permitted them to spend with abandon at times.

The real problems in Philly come in at the back end.

The Pronger deal wasn't expensive at the time, but it was a gaffe to sign him long-term past his 35th birthday. This contract is central to their problem.

Timonen is another. If Price/Halak was a luxury, Pronger/Timonen was a bigger one. Both players are paid to be #1 Dmen, but the name implies there can only be one #1 Dman. The other became the most expensive second fiddle in the league.

And it didn't stop there. Rather than fill out a roster like everyone else in the league would with prospects and a couple of cheaper contracts at the back (to defend other teams' fourth lines), Holmgren put $3 million players at every hole.

The Flyers biggest cap problem was their luxury defense, which got them 7th best D in the East with 6 less GA than Florida.

Other than their $22 million defence corps, Philly also took on the dead weight contract of Kris Versteeg. In fact, they repeated their luxury buying attitude up front with a third line that included double millionaires all around.


Fix is temporary

Philly found a temporary fix for immediate cap space, but based on the Bryzgalov signing, it won't be used for prudent and conservative rebuilding. In fact, when the grossly overpaid forward comes in as the replacement for Carter/Richards, fans will most likely be wondering what these deals were for.


Habs news more encouraging

The Habs did better in the last couple of days with their signings and seem less likely to implode their plan and go schizophrenically down the garden path. While I'll always lament Gauthier for not getting in on action like Ville Leino or Andrej Meszaros, I at least admire his commitment to the plan he thought was working last spring. Holmgren on the other hand...

The Flyers moves do also serve the Habs well since this team was a chief rival and those two players were chief nemeses. Some fans will point to the danger of the rebuild for the Habs more distant future, but the contracts at the back, together with the quick trigger of Holmgren seem to provide the insurance that this team won't be a perennial problem.


I guess this whole thing just shows that making a cap mess will catch up with your team at some point. Chicago's mess cost them a lot, but they have a Cup to show for it. Philly, mere games away, just got a mess.

It's Probably Asking Too Much...

It's probably asking too much of a Phildelphia Flyer to take reflection before he speaks, or heaven forbid before he hits. But that is probably just what Mike Richards needs to do in the future.

By now, you've all read what Richards said about PK Subban. Basically a rant against rookie respect, etc. etc. Tobalev addressed this with succinct and prescient truth in the post-game report, so I won't get too much into where we stand on the actions of rookies again.

Instead, I just want to talk about reflection.

Mike Richards, we all know is not the man to be making judgments on the largesse of 21 year-olds. By the age of 21, he was already putting NHL veterans in hospital.



And that's very relevant to my point. Pots that don't know their colour shouldn't necessarily be too quick to come down on kettles.

Just in blogging, I can tell you there are many finished and unfinished posts that never get published because of reflection. Before posting, I try to honestly answer a few questions after a re-read of my position. If an attack on the media sounds on second read like it could be an attack on myself, i usually restrain myself from sharing the half-baked thoughts. I held one back about something, just today.

There are two things at issue here. The first is that obviously made himself look a foolish hypocrite. That's fine. But the other more important issue is that Mike Richards seems to honestly think that he cares about respect in the league. All I would ask is that upon a little reflection, maybe before the next career he effectively ends, that he think about what that means and whether he himself is living up to the "lofty" standard he pretends to.