Quick Hits: January 1, 2020
1) Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher conducted a video press conference around noontime on Thursday to discuss several items before the start of training camp:
* The team's training camp roster will be released on Saturday. Fletcher also said that all players who will be on the roster are now in Voorhees. Pre-camp quarantines will not be an issue for camp and the start of the regular season on Jan. 13.
* Goaltending prospect Kirill Ustimenko, who played a couple of games on loan to a club in Belarus during the prolonged NHL offseason before being shut down, recently underwent surgery to repair a torn hip labrum. A full recovery is expected but the recovery timeline is expected to be four to five months. Felix Sandström has returned from his loan to an Allsvenskan club in Sweden and is ready for camp before the potential February start of the American Hockey League season.
* In the day's most intriguing news, Fletcher said that Samuel Morin will attempt to make a positional switch from defense to left wing. Morin is now healthy after missing essentially the last two and three-quarter seasons due to two separate ACL tears in his right knee and, before that, a recurring issue with psoas muscle tears. Morin has been practicing as a winger for a couple of months.
According to Fletcher, the positional switch represents Morin's best chance to earn an NHL roster spot in the immediate future and his combination of size and physicality match a need the Flyers' have in their lineup. Fletcher said both the organization and the player himself are committed to seeing the experiment through.
Morin spoke after Fletcher. He said that the positional change was originally suggested in October by Alain Vigneault, along with Ian Laperriere. Vigneault told the player that the Flyers got pushed around physically by the New York Islanders in the playoffs, and Morin could help address that. The player said that, apart from daily practices as a forward, he's watched a lot of video. He's trying to pattern himself after longtime NHL role player Matt Martin, and keep his game simple, straight north-south, with short shifts.
Morin said that he feels fine now but admitted that he's not back to the level he was --
which was right on the brink of an extended NHL opportunity -- before the string of major injuries. The Flyers 2013 first-round pick said that he realizes that he's fighting for the survival of his career at this point. Although he believes he could still have a career as a defenseman, Morin also believes that it's a bigger priority to simply play hockey again and that being a role-playing winger is the better avenue for him at this point in time.
Back in minor hockey, according to Morin, he started out as a forward. However, he soon switched to defense. Morin admitted that there many details to being a winger that he's still working on, such as positional play in the defensive zone, but feels like he's making progress.
During his video conference, Morin reiterated the central idea of what he told me in a one-on-one interview back in May:
He is still driven by the dream of becoming a regular in the NHL and will do whatever is asked of him in the quest to make it come true. It's been seven years since Morin was first drafted and he's been on the cusp of an NHL breakthrough a few times -- he was even a late-camp cut in his very first NHL camp in 2013 --but has only dressed in a combined nine NHL games to date.
2) Back in the mid-1990s, the Flyers tried to convert struggling 1992 first-round pick Jason Bowen from a defenseman to a left winger (where had previous experience, even at the major junior level). It did not work out as hoped, as Bowen's development actually continued to regress. On the flip side, switching from defense to left wing proved beneficial for Dan Kordic, who made it back to the NHL and played a couple of years as a regular on the Flyers' fourth line (albeit in a different era, when there was still a viable path for old-school enforcers to find NHL jobs).
There is a misconception about Morin that he's a slow skater. Actually, before the ACL tears, he was actually an above-average straight line skater whose giant strides enabled him to close in open ice even on speedsters the caliber of Anthony Duclair. The skating adjustments that Morin had to make had nothing to do with his straight-line ability but more with his pivots, and use of his feet in close quarters (where his long reach was sometimes a disadvantage). The bigger adjustments had to do with decision-making both off-puck and on-puck. He too often tried to do a little too much; even at the AHL level he got away with things that probably would not have worked very often in the NHL.
Morin is NOT devoid of skill. He isn't a bad passer and he has a cannon of a shot albeit not the most accurate of one or quickly released, which is why he was no longer a power play regular after his junior hockey career. Less is more with Morin. The more under control he plays, the more effective he tends to be.
He wasn't going to be the next Zdeno Chara and certainly not the next Chris Pronger, but he probably would have found a regular role with the Flyers at some point if not for the injuries. Being exclusively a left-side defenseman and competing for a spot against a rookie Travis Sanheim and fellow 2013 draftee Robert Hägg (whom both Ron Hextall and Dave Hakstol were a little higher on because they felt that the Swede had finally found a consistent niche whereas Morin was still trying to find exactly what worked for him and what didn't, so he had lower lows competing with higher highs).
Morin didn't seem far away, though, before the first psoas muscle tear. In fact, some felt that he had outplayed Hägg in training camp in Sept. 2017. The voices that ultimately counted -- the GM and the head coach -- felt Hägg had gotten all he could out of his three years in the AHL (he came over at 19 for a slide-rule eligible rookie year, so he arrived in the North American pros a season ahead of Morin).
Even when Morin went back to the Phantoms in the fall of 2017, it felt like he'd be competing all year to move up for his first extended batch of NHL games. His eventual role may have been
on the third pair and the penalty kill, playing 15 or 16 minutes a night, but he'd have gladly taken it.
Unfortunately, Morin started breaking down physically within the first quarter of the 2017-18 season. The repeated aggravation of the psoas muscle issue caused him to be shut down first for four weeks, then for six weeks and then, after getting injured again in the Phantoms' outdoor game in Hershey, for the rest of the regular season. He returned during the playoffs, but in the first period of his third game (the Phantoms' five-overtime win in Charlotte), he tore his right ACL.
Since that time, Morin missed about 10 months rehabbing the first tear. He got into a combined 11 games (six in the NHL, five in the AHL) before suffering the second ACL tear on a seemingly harmless play. Another long rehab followed, bringing him up to where he is right now: trying to save his career through a position switch.
As anyone who has ever interacted with Morin off the ice knows, he is someone who is impossible to root against: bubbly, enthusiastic, usually smiling and almost invariably optimistic. He's had bad nothing but rotten luck for three years and he's now 25 years old. I will be rooting hard for him to make the switch to forward a successful one.
Do I have some skepticism over whether it will work? Yes, mainly due to Morin missing all of that time and now trying to start over at a position he hasn't played since early in minor hockey. But I also know how strong his desire is and how excellent his work ethic is. If he can figure out some of the nuances of playing a structured game on the wing and if he can get his straight-line skating back close to where it was before -- since he'll be mainly going north-south and battling on the walls -- he's at least got a shot if he can finally stay healthy.
3) Today in Flyers History: 2010 Winter Classic
The Flyers have played eight New Year's Day games in franchise history. The Winter Classic game at Boston's Fenway Park in 2010 was the only New Year's Day match the Flyers played between 1983 and a 2017 game in Anaheim.
In the third annual NHL Winter Classic, the Flyers did not trail the Boston Bruins at any point in regulation but dropped a 2-1 overtime decision.
After a scoreless first period, Flyers defenseman Danny Syvret opened the scoring at 4:42 of the second period. The goal was an odd one. Driven to distraction by Scott Hartnell in front of his net, Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas neglected the ongoing play to skate out and attack the Flyers forward. Just then, Syvret shot into the now-open net.
The Flyers carried the 1-0 lead until time ticked down to 1:18 left in the third period. Former Flyers right winger Mark Recchi broke up Michael Leighton's shutout bid and tied the game.
In the final 46 seconds of regulation, Flyers center Danny Briere was penalized for tripping. Boston does not score on the ensuing 4-on-3 power play in overtime but won the game nine seconds later as Marco Sturm' scored. The Flyers settled for one point from the regular season game. Philly would get its revenge in the playoffs, recovering from a three games to zero deficit to defeat the Bruins in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
4) Flyers Alumni birthday: LA Kings center Jeff Carter, who was a Flyer for the first six years of his now 16-year NHL career, was born in London, Ontario on New Year's Day 1985.
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