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Flyers prospectus: Question marks among top wingers |
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Depending on how a team uses it, depth can be a blessing or a curse. The Flyers have plenty of wing talent on the big club and in the prospect pipeline (it’s the farm system’s greatest strength). Now the organization is faced with some tough assessments as to which players to lock up for the long-term and which to dangle as trade bait to meet other needs.
Today we’ll look at Simon Gagne, Vaclav Prospal, Scott Hartnell, Joffrey Lupul and R.J. Umberger. With the exception of Hartnell, each of these key players enters the offseason with question marks about health (Gagne), offseason signability (Prospal, Umberger) or long-term future with the club (Umberger and Lupul).
In the next installment, we’ll look at Scottie Upshall, Mike Knuble, Steve Downie, Riley Cote, Sami Kapanen and Patrick Thoresen.
Later this week, in the final blog of the offseason prospectus series, we’ll look at the top wing prospects in the farm system: Claude Giroux, James vanRiemsdyk, Andreas Nödl, Patrick Maroon and Stefan Ruzicka.
When this series is done, the focus will turn to a series of blogs related to the NHL Entry Draft.
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Simon Gagne
Contract status: Signed through 2010-2011
Salary cap hit: $5.25 million
Before the season, if someone were to tell you that Simon Gagne would be limited by concussion problems to 25 games and seven goals, would you have thought the Flyers would still be a 95-point team that reached the Eastern Conference Finals? I sure wouldn’t.
The Flyers were able to offset Gagne’s lost offensive punch through the club’s overall scoring depth and the acquisition of Vaclav Prospal on the eve of the NHL trading deadline. But his two-way presence and speed were still greatly missed. It’s not a coincidence that the club was 16-8-1 when he was in the lineup this season (26-21-10 in the regular season without him, 9-8 in the postseason).
The club's history with concussions certainly gives pause for concern, but I think the club handled Gagne's most recent concussion the right way by shutting him down for the season.
Some people have expressed the view that the Flyers should shop Gagne now to gauge his trade value and perhaps gain significant salary cap relief from Gagne's $5.25 million cap hit. But in this day and age you can't get both value and salary cap relief, and Gagne’s value is down as long as he’s surrounded by question marks about his health.
Gagne not only has to show that he can remain concussion free, he also has to show he can play at his accustomed level. Gagne was a tentative, perimeter player in his January return to the lineup. Come next season, he has to play without fear or hesitation, which is easier said than done when you’re talking about a career-threatening problem such as repeated concussion.
With Vaclav Prospal unlikely to be re-signed as an unrestricted free agent, the Flyers need a healthy Gagne in the lineup next year. Claude Giroux has outstanding potential but he's not going to step right onto the first line.
In a worst -case scenario (i.e., Gagne's concussion issues continue), the Flyers will have to put him back on LTIR and make a trade for another Prospal type of player at next year's deadline.
Key stat: In the 16 games the Flyers won with Gagne in the lineup, the left winger had 14 points, including four powerplay goals and four powerplay assists. In the nine games the club lost with Gagne in the lineup, he had just one goal and four points and was a minus-10.
Vaclav Prospal
Contract status: Unrestricted free agent
Salary cap hit: TBD ($1.9 million in 2007-08)
Coming off a 33-goal season with the Lighting and the Flyers, unrestricted free agent Vaclav Prospal is line for a substantial raise on the open market. The 33-year-old is unlikely to be resigned by the Flyers.
Prospal helped the Flyers advance with his play with the Flyers down the stretch (14 points in 18 games) and the first round of the playoffs (three goals, six assists in the Washington series). The club may not have reached the playoffs at all, and would not have beaten Washington, if not for Prospal’s chemistry with Daniel Briere and the role Scott Hartnell played in creating space for his linemates.
But when the checking got tighter in the Eastern Conference Semifinals and Finals, Prospal all but disappeared (no goals, three assists over the final 10 playoff games). He was soft on the puck along the boards and unable to create time and space on the line rush. John Stevens called Prospal out for not moving his feet in the offensive zone, but the player did not make the necessary adjustments with any consistency.
Key stat: Thirteen of Prospal’s 33 goals during the regular season gave his team the lead in the game at the time they were scored. Fifteen of his tallies were scored in the third period. Three of his goals were scored against the Flyers prior to his acquisition from Tampa.
Scott Hartnell
Contract status: Signed through 2012-13
Salary cap hit: $4.08 million
For the type of player Scott Hartnell is – a grinder and agitator who scores dirty-but-good goals when paired with the right linemates – he is very expensive. But it’s hard to imagine the team having gone as far as it without his presence in the lineup.
A lot of the things he does won’t jump out at you in his stats, but when he’s on his game – hitting, crashing the net, getting under the skin of the opposition – he’s a tone setter. There are also games where he seems to have two left feet and takes bad penalties, but the positive usually outweighs the negative with Hartnell.
Case in point: Hartnell was a member of two of the Flyers’ hottest line combinations during the season. In January, the line of Mike Richards, Hartnell and Steve Downie carried the club for about a two-week period. Late in the season, he did much of the dirty work on the boards that enabled Daniel Briere and Vinny Prospal to create scoring chances.
Hartnell is by no means a pure goal scorer. Many of his goals go in off his leg or skate, or are scored in goal mouth scrambles. Considering that he went scoreless in October and had just three goals – two of the empty-net variety – in the first 23 games of the season, finishing with 24 goals was a nice accomplishment. It marked the third consecutive season that Hartnell has scratched out 22 or more goals.
The biggest of his three postseason tallies this year was a key goal in the deciding game of the Montreal series. Hartnell pounced on a Prospal rebound from the right circle and buried it past a befuddled Carey Price.
Key stat: Hartnell was one of the Flyers’ best road players this season. In 40 road games, he scored 14 goals and 24 points, was credited with 61 hits and was a plus-six. In 40 home games, he had 10 goals, 19 points, was credited with 49 hits (the Wachovia Center RSS crew is much stingier with awarding hits than some other cities’ crews) and was a minus-four.
Joffrey Lupul
Contract status: Signed through 2008-09
Salary cap hit: $2.3 million
With Lupul entering a restricted free agent contract-drive next season, the Flyers face a critical decision with the hard-shooting winger. The club will have to determine if he’s a nucleus player or one who can be sacrificed in trade to meet other needs.
Lupul, who will turn 25 in September, has sent mixed messages in his career. His collection of physical attributes is exceptional. But he doesn’t always use the tools with which he’s been blessed.
Production wise, Lupul has always been streaky. In terms of his all-around game, he’s effective when he uses his combination of size and speed and not so effective when he tries to out-finesse other teams. When he’s hitting and winning races to loose pucks, the goals soon follow. When he stops doing those things, the goals dry up, too.
After returning to the lineup from a high ankle sprain, Lupul did not skate as well as he had earlier in the season. He should be back to full speed by next season. Prior to the ankle injury, Lupul showed no ill-effects after returning from spinal bruising and a concussion suffered in a Jan. 5 collision with teammate Derian Hatcher.
Lupul scored four goals and 10 points in the playoffs; a total that fell a bit short of expectations. But all of his goals – most notably, the overtime game winner in the seventh game of the Washington series – were crucial ones at the time they were scored.
Key stat: In December, Lupul had two hat tricks in three games (scoring 10 of his 20 goals in a torrid month. He was also a point-per-game player through the first dozen games of the season.
In the middle, he sustained a pre-injury drought of zero goals and two points in 11 games. Not coincidentally, during that 11-game drought, he averaged less than one hit per game; overall he was credited with 79 hits in 56 games this season. After returning from the high ankle sprain, Lupul scored just two goals in the final 10 games of the regular season. One was a crucial goal in a playoff-spot clinching win over New Jersey the final weekend of the regular season.
R.J. Umberger
Contract status: Restricted free agent
Salary cap hit: TBD ($1.15 million in 2007-08)
Should the Flyers try to sell high and trade restricted free agent R.J. Umberger when he’s coming off a tremendous playoff run? Or is his versatility too valuable to give up?
I’ll reiterate what I wrote in the season wrapup: Despite Umberger's extraordinary series against the Canadiens, I think he’s still viewed by the organization more as a high-end role player than a nucleus player. At 26 (he’ll turn 27 during the playoffs next year) Umberger is reaching the age where he’s likely to be about as good as he’s going to get.
Umberger has good all-around skills and is a very underrated passer, but he’s also prone to streakiness at both ends of the ice. There are stretches of games where Umberger is an impact player (even when he’s not scoring goals) and other times where you’re hard pressed to remember five good shifts over a five-game segment.
R.J. complained publicly when he found himself on the fourth line at the start of the playoffs. In reality, he played himself into that role with a mediocre second half of the season (over his final 21 games of the season, he scored just two goals, 12 points and was a minus-nine). To his credit, Umberger took the fourth-line assignment as motivation and went on to have an outstanding playoff run and was a one-man wrecking crew against Montreal.
Umberger is arbitration-eligible this summer. If he goes that route, he may get a heftier raise, but he will be an unrestricted agent next summer. Umberger has said he’d like to stay in Philadelphia long-term, but at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to a business decision.
Key stat: It’s a well-known fact that Umberger scored six of his 13 goals this season against the Penguins. Less known is the fact that when Umberger scored, chances were good the Flyers won. That makes sense, because his goals were indicative of the club getting balanced scoring. In 36 games Umberger played in which the Flyers won, he scored 11 goals and tallied 30 points. In 38 losses, he had just two goals and 20 points.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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