Flyers playing on borrowed time?

Eleven years. $58 million dollars. That is what it took for the Philadelphia Flyers to get Jeff Carter to finally put pen to paper. While the numbers look huge there, the sliding scale of Carter’s affiliation with the Flyers really means that the franchise has picked themselves up a bargain. Carter will only account for around $5 million worth of cap space over the next eleven years, and for the man who could have demanded much bigger sums of money from around the NHL, loyalty in the end won out. Carter wants to play for the Flyers, and naturally the Flyers want him. What franchise wouldn’t? What team couldn’t he walk straight into? The 25 year old centre would have become a restricted free agent come July 1st, 2011, but that was never really going to play out, the contract talks were never going to let things get to that point. There was no way that the Flyers would have let him dangle out there, and although the contract discussions between the star and the team had been rumbling on since the summer, both sides have deemed that the outcome and the negotiations themselves were perfectly amicable. It was all about dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s. Next in line to sign on the dotted line with a contract extension, should be left wing Ville Leino, another great long term prospect for the ambitious club. Why should these signings be courting so much attention? Simply because they are at the heart of something big happening in Philadelphia.

With all the talk surrounding the Pittsburgh Penguins, the San Jose Sharks, the Washington Capitals and the Detroit Red Wings at the start of the season, the Flyers have almost surreptitiously been winding their way into contention. They seemingly got to the finals last year from nowhere, and while they won a lot of plaudits for their play-off adventures, they weren’t tipped to be heading straight back there. Now they can be. There have been no big fanfares surrounding Philadelphia, no posturing among the headlines and clamoring for attention amongst the Crosby’s and Ovechkin’s, there has just been some good hockey. Make that incredible, explosive hockey. Great hockey. The hockey you wished your team was playing. Getting Carter to sign long term is a sign that Philadelphia are in for the long haul, and he will constitute as being the glue of an incredibly strong and envious core of players for years to come with the Flyers. With the Penguins misfiring and still looking for answers as to why, the Flyers have taken firm control at the top of the Atlantic division, and are second in scoring only to the Caps in the entire league at the time of writing. They suddenly represent a very strong Stanley Cup contender, especially after squeaking into the play offs last season with 88 points. That entry into the play-offs was then embellished by a fantastic run which took them to the finals, beating New Jersey, Boston and Montreal along the way. They couldn’t however, get best of the Chicago Blackhawks in the Stanley Cup finals, going down 4-2.

The Flyers stepped up a gear when they hit the play-offs last season, and they haven’t looked back. But the Flyers can take a much stronger team into the play-offs this year, and there should be no last minute ifs, buts or maybes about whether they will get in or not. They will and they would be worthy finalists again. The fact that they lost in the Stanley Cup finals last year to Chicago is a particularly good lesson to learn about timing. The Chicago Blackhawks model is one which throws a lot of uncertainty around the NHL. Their incredibly strong Stanley Cup winning squad, was greatly different from that which is being shepherded around the NHL this season, and that is down to the salary cap. The Flyers are likely to find themselves in a similar position come next season, so the window of opportunity for them to take things just one step further could be very limited. The Blackhawks are not the domineering, fear-inducing team that they were last season. So the Flyers too, may be playing on borrowed time. Free agents will walk at the end of the season, as players like Nikolai Zherdev and Brian Boucher head a list of potential free agents. The Flyers, who have a projected league-high pay roll for next year, cannot keep them all. But, along with Carter, the signature of right wing Claude Giroux last week was a big coup also, as he leads the club in points and goals. The Flyers have everything needed to go on and win the Stanley Cup this year, a formidable defense, and an offence which is lightning quick and relentless. They will continue to blow teams away this year with their firepower, and while the “now” is the most important factor for the Flyers, they need to keep one eye on the future. A future led by Jeff Carter.