I have very mixed feelings about yesterday's trade that send James van Riemsdyk to Toronto in exchange for defenseman Luke Schenn. Ultimately, though, the bottom line on the deal right now is that is one that has a chance to help both sides immediately and in the long term.

To me, the trade creates as many questions as it answers.

My feelings on van Riemsdyk have not changed from when I wrote the "JVR and the Curse of Potential" blog last month. Oddly enough, my feelings on Schenn are rather similar.

First of all, van Riemsdyk isn't a "bust." Not yet. Patrik Stefan was a bust. Jason Bonsignore was a bust. Pat Falloon didn't start out as a true bust, but turned into one. JVR clearly belongs in the NHL but has struggled with inconsistency and injuries thus far in his career. He isn't yet where the Flyers or the player himself would have wanted him to be at the end of his third NHL season, but he's also not as far off as his harshest critics like to say he is.

If you take the calendar year period of Nov. 18, 2010 (when he began to emerge from an early season struggle that saw him go 19 games without a goal) to Nov. 19, 2011 (the start of his injury woes this past season) this is what you will find:

* excluding the 2011 Playoffs, his stat line was 79 GP, 29 G, 23 A, 52 PTS
* including the 2011 Playoffs, his stat line was 90 GP, 36 G, 23 A, 59 PTS

Are those earth-shattering numbers? No. But they really aren't all that far off from taking the next step to produce at a level similar to Anaheim's Bobby Ryan of the course of a particular full season (not the virtual equivalent of one).

By no means am I saying that JVR is a finished product. There are fair criticisms that can be levied against him. I do understand why some people within the organization became frustrated with him. There are times when he plays soft and smaller than his size. When JVR tries to be strictly a finesse player, he rarely succeeds for very long. The defensive side of his game also still needs considerable improvement.

The one criticism against JVR that I have never bought, however, is that he lacks passion for the game. Really? Is that why he spent two consecutive summers in Voorhees working out both on and off the ice? Is that why he tried to play through a torn oblique muscle this past season?

Now, I do feel like sometimes JVR has gotten into a comfort zone on the ice and needs to be pushed a little to move beyond it. But in terms of lacking passion, it's simply not true. He's a player who cares about his team and the progress of his career. I have always found him to be very grounded and level-headed. I've never personally seen him as a lackadaisical sort nor is he an excuse-maker in bad times.

More important than that: A year ago at this time, the organization seemed convinced he was on the right track. They gave him a hefty contract extension for six seasons, and a cap-hit raise from his $1.65 million entry-level deal to $4.25 million. One injury-plagued year later, suddenly he's someone they don't want anymore.

If JVR is healthy, I think he can do well in Toronto. The whole injury saga this summer was bizarre, though. At first, the Flyers said JVR had a torn labrum and needed hip surgery. Then the surgery gets delayed because the player was still dealing with an infection in the foot that was operated on back in March. Then the player himself said it wasn't actually the labrum and wasn't a tear. Finally, the team announces that he doesn't need surgery after all and should be fine for next season without surgery.

Part of me wonders whether JVR decided to go and get a second opinion on his own, and that rankled Flyers' management a bit (just as his decision to play a second collegiate season rather than turning pro a year earlier at the club's behest caused some anger toward him). A seldom-recalled piece of what soured the Flyers' organization on Eric Lindros back in the day was his family's insistence on using a private doctor and going with his recommendations rather than accepting what team-hired doctors recommended upon their initial examinations of the player.

Brian Burke has traded for van Riemsdyk knowing full well that the player has been through four significant injuries since November: a torn oblique muscle, a concussion, a broken foot and whatever the nature of the nagging hip injury actually is. I don't think he'll fail his physical or Toronto would seek a nullification of the trade (for obvious reasons) even if there were still some medical concerns raised by the Toronto doctors.

I'm sure the Leafs and JVR himself will pronounce the player 100 percent healthy and ready to go just as the Flyers did, and I hope for JVR's sake it's true. Even so, I'm equally sure that a big part of Toronto's initial reluctance to complete the trade had to do with JVR's injuries over the past year. Now that the deal is done, reversing course is pretty much a non-option.

Now that van Riemsdyk has been dealt, I wonder what that does to the Flyers' pursuit of a trade for a first-line winger. He was going to be the key part of any trade. I doubt the club would break up the Schenn brothers before they even play together. And I would hope at least that Sean Couturier is virtually untouchable.

So what does that leave as trading chips for Ryan? Jakub Voracek doesn't have the same trading cache as JVR did, nor does Matt Read or Wayne Simmonds. Do they re-sign Jaromir Jagr for one year, and then re-evaluate again next summer?

In addition, with the addition of Luke Schenn, the Flyers now have six starting defensemen in place (assuming they re-sign Matt Carle), plus youngsters Marc-Andre Bourdon and Erik Gustafsson. Do they still pursue another defenseman, perhaps tying into the deal either Andrej Meszaros (coming off back surgery) or Braydon Coburn and his new contract extension (because this organization has shown multiple times that it has no problem trading a player it recently extended)?

Alternatively, do they wait to see if Nashville's Shea Weber signs a one-season deal with Nashville this summer and sets out on a course that would almost inevitably lead to choosing unrestricted free agency in 2013? Do they try to trade for Keith Yandle or impending 2013 UFA Tobias Enström as the long-term replacement for Kimmo Timonen?

As for Luke Schenn, the path that led him to join his brother in Philadelphia is somewhat similar to the one that led JVR to Toronto: sky-high expectations, sporadic delivery. He has not (yet) become the shutdown defenseman the Leafs expected him to be, but he also hasn't been nearly as bad as his critics say. Keep in mind:

1) Virtually all defensemen experience a few seasons of growing pains early in their NHL careers, and quite a few end up blossoming in their second organization. Schenn's upside as the more-defensive minded half of a top pairing remains intact at age 22. He's been through four NHL seasons now.

2) Schenn has demonstrated periodic abilities as an above-average puck mover, especially for a player of his size (6-foot-2, 230 pounds). Combine that with the fact that he ranked 7th in the NHL in hits (270) and blocked 115 shots this past season and you've got a player who has some good things to offer as second-pairing type even if his own struggles with inconsistency continue.

3) Even if he's not a power play point guy, there is defensive value to having a righthanded defenseman, which is something the Flyers absolutely needed. They needed someone whose stick is in the proper side to defend the opposing left winger and not have to wheel around or go backhand to handle dump-ins to that corner of the ice.

Having two brothers playing on the same team can either be a positive thing or a negative, depending on the situation and the personalities involved. In the case of the Schenn boys, I think having Brayden and Luke together could be a positive thing.

Final point: Despite JVR being out of the lineup so often last season, the Flyers were still a potent offensive team. So I don't think the trade will necessarily hurt the club offensively. I sincerely hope the trade proves to help the Flyers get better as a team while also resulting in JVR elevating his game on a long-term basis. The first outcome is the only one that really matters in these parts now.



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Yesterday afternoon, I was in the process of starting to place some phone calls and sending out emails and texts to try to obtain scouting information about the Flyers' 2nd-round to 7th-round selections in the NHL Draft (apart from what is already available online about them). Then the JVR trade went down and the attention shifted.

In the days to come, I will post sub-sections on each of the Flyers' picks after first-rounder Scott Laughton (whom I discussed yesterday). Today, I will simply chime in with some general first impressions of the latter picks:

* If Laughton and one additional player ultimately turns out to be a solid NHL player, the draft will have been a success. With the exception of offensive-minded defensemen Shayne Gostisbehere, few of the latter picks were swing-for-the fences types, but the organization did add four defenseman and another goaltender to the mix.

* The Flyers took quite a few collegiate or college-bound prospects and selected quite a few from lower-level leagues (NAHL, BCHL, Russia's junior/minor league MHL, a player who spent the majority of last season at Sweden's U18 level).

* Laughton, Taylor Leier, and Fredric Larsson fall within the two-year entry level contract evaluation/signing window as two players from CHL clubs and one from Sweden (a European country with a transfer agreement with the NHL). The team will have until June 1, 2014 to sign these players if they so desire.

* Anthony Stolarz, Gostisbehere and Reece Willcox will play collegiate hockey next year, and the Flyers will have the duration of their college careers to evaluate whether to sign them to entry-level contracts. Gostisbehere as a sophomore defenseman for Union College, Stolarz as a freshman goaltender for Nebraska-Omaha, and Willcox as a freshman defenseman for Cornell.

* Valeri Vasiliev also falls outside the two-year signing requirement by virtue of the Russian Hockey Federation not having a transfer agreement with the NHL. The NHL will recognize the Flyers' hold on his NHL rights for an indefinite number of years until such a time that there is either a new transfer agreement or a new CBA specifies a specific limit on years for holding rights of drafted players from Russia (and the Czech leagues).

* Of the four defensemen the Flyers drafted, the two North Americans are puck-moving types, and the undersized-but-savvy Gostibehere has intriguing offensive upside. The two Europeans are bigger, defensive-minded defensemen.

* Personally, I would have rather seen the Flyers go for Finnish goaltender Joonas Korpisalo than Stolarz once the top three ranked goalies (Andrei Vasilevski, Malcolm Subban and Oscar Dansk) were off the board by the time their second-round pick came up. Stolarz has the big frame and athleticism that teams value nowadays but, for a second round pick, I'd have preferred a goalie who has played against a higher grade of competition than Stolarz has faced thus far. Alternatively, I'd have preferred a position player in round two and Stolarz or another goalie selection later in the draft. Then again, drafting goalies is a sheer crapshoot most of the time.

* No, it does not bother me that the Flyers did not draft Tomas Hyka. I have doubts he'll ever be an NHL player. However, I do find it curious that the club thought he was worthy of an entry-level contract last September (and would have signed him to one had the rules allowed it) and yet they had other players higher than him on their draft list as late as the fifth round this year. The Los Angeles Kings ultimately selected the undersized Hyka in the 6th round yesterday -- with a selection that originally belonged to the Flyers.

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