PHILADELPHIA — Here’s what it would take for the Flyers to sign Johnny Gaudreau.
It would take Gaudreau not being 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds and quick and shifty and as skilled as any forward in the National Hockey League. It would take him being 10 feet tall and bulletproof and capable of squeezing a diamond into dust in the palm of his hand.
It would take Gaudreau scoring more than the career-high 115 points he had last season for the Calgary Flames. It would take him scoring more than the 215 points that Wayne Gretzky scored in 1985-86, which is the NHL’s single-season record. It would take him scoring 315 points in a season. Then doing it again. And again.
It would take Gaudreau — the best player on the league’s free-agent market this summer, certain to sign a long-term contract that will pay him, on average, $9 million-10 million a year — agreeing to play here for free.
Unless these conditions materialize very soon, the Flyers should not consider shedding the players and salary required to shoehorn Gaudreau into a roster spot. They have too far to go in improving themselves for Gaudreau to make the kind of difference that would justify all the necessary moves and machinations. They are a team that needs to take its time and be prudent, and signing Gaudreau would repeat the organization’s same pattern for rash decision-making that put it in this position in the first place. They are not a team poised to make a giant leap forward. Gaudreau is a great player, but he’s not that great. No one is.
Does this argument sound familiar? It should. The Flyers keep insisting, in word and deed, that they don’t have to rebuild, that they can retool instead. They are desperate to be relevant again, and even if they don’t plan to pursue Gaudreau, they probably don’t mind the lingering scuttlebutt and speculation that they’re interested in him. It would be a great story, after all: Gaudreau is a South Jersey native, and his joining the Flyers theoretically would mark a triumphant homecoming for one of the most dynamic forwards in hockey.
That narrative and those appeals would make for a feel-good public reaction, a warm afterglow, if the Flyers were to win the bidding war for Gaudreau. But too much can be made, and already has been made, of his local connections. I’m sure Gaudreau would enjoy returning here to play. But I’m also sure that he has been asked, Would you like to play for the Flyers? roughly 3 million times ever since the Flames drafted him out of Boston College in 2011. And I’m also sure that he has absolutely nothing to gain, when asked that question, by saying, “I’m weighing my options” or “Well, I’d rather play for a club that has won more than one playoff series in the last 10 years” or “Hell. No.” And I’m also sure that he knows that he has nothing to gain by answering that question in that manner — and if he doesn’t know it, his agent does.
So put aside that emotion, put aside the fan base’s and the franchise’s own frustrations over the rut in which the Flyers are stuck, and look at the situation from a more rational, distant perspective. Based on the top-end talent of the four teams that reached this year’s conference finals — the Colorado Avalanche, the Edmonton Oilers, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the New York Rangers — the Flyers aren’t one star away from having a realistic chance of winning a Stanley Cup. They’re not even two stars away. They’re two stars away from being two stars away.
Gaudreau is in his prime, but it is his later prime. He turns 29 next month. Sign him to a six- or seven-year contract at top-of-the-market money, and you have to hope that — three years from now, four years from now, when the Flyers might finally be ready to compete for a Cup — Gaudreau will still be the same player he is now, or a close approximation of that player. If the Flyers already had a young core in place, and if that core were missing just a jewel of Gaudreau’s quality, then yes. Go get him. Pay him, and don’t look back. But they don’t have that kind of core yet, and it will do them no good to skip steps in a lengthy and deliberate process.
“There are three ways to build a team: draft, trade, sign,” said Dale Tallon, formerly the general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks and Florida Panthers, who was recently hired by the Vancouver Canucks as a scout and senior adviser. “The last one is the last option. The rest of the stuff takes time and commitment.”
More, to create the financial room for Gaudreau, the Flyers would in all likelihood have to make a series of counterproductive changes. What makes more sense: Including a precious supply of prospects and draft picks in a trade to get James van Riemsdyk’s salary off the books now, or waiting a year for his contract to expire? Trading Travis Konecny — when he’s 25 — and who knows what other assets to add Gaudreau? Whatever moves the Flyers would have to make to accommodate Gaudreau’s presence would hamper their ability to better themselves over the long haul. What good is it to pay a premium to sign a star when, for much of his time here, the team around him would be weaker for having signed him?
It would be a waste, and the Flyers can’t afford to start the clock any later on a full-fledged rebuild that should have begun a long time ago.
