Philadelphia Flyers' Rebuild off to Great Start After Savvy Trade-Deadline Moves

For years, the Philadelphia Flyers have been ridiculed for managerial excess, with Paul Holmgren earning the nickname YOLO for his apparent you-only-live-once approach to handling the salary cap and Ron Hextall being criticized for deals such as the massive free-agent contract awarded to analytics whipping boy Andrew MacDonald.

But at the 2015 NHL trade deadline, Hextall made some significant progress in turning the team’s reputation around.

The Flyers entered the deadline period with some major problems. The team’s willingness to hand out rich, long-term contracts has induced an ugly salary-cap situation, with far too many mediocrities signed to far too much money. The payoff in the present hasn’t been there, either, with the Flyers six points out of the race for the final wild-card spot in the East as of Monday. Hextall hasn’t changed all that, but with a pair of trades he’s helped get the rebuild moving in the right direction.

We should start with the masterpiece here, the Kimmo Timonen trade.

Timonen is a splendid defenseman. The veteran of more than 1,000 NHL games has been gold for the Flyers since arriving in trade from Nashville nearly a decade ago, initially as an all-situations workhorse and later as a specialist on both the power play and penalty kill. There isn’t a team in the league that wouldn’t find value in a happy, healthy Timonen.

Len Redkoles/Getty Images

But Timonen is now 39 years old, with his best seasons in the rearview mirror. Even worse, a frightening offseason problem with blood clots cast his career into jeopardy; as recently as January, Hextall was telling Stephen Whyno of The Canadian Press that the player’s return to hockey was “up in the air” as tests revealed that the clots were gone from the player’s lungs but could still be found in his right leg.  

Somehow, Hextall managed to extract a return from the Chicago Blackhawks for an ancient defenseman who hasn’t played since last April. Incredibly, it wasn’t a "here’s a fifth-round pick on the odd chance he helps us" type of return, either; Hextall managed to pick up a second-round pick in the deep 2015 draft and an additional conditional selection.

Hextall wasn’t finished. Two days after sticking up Chicago’s Stan Bowman, he pulled the trigger on a deal with Tampa Bay that saw the Flyers land a rich return for Braydon Coburn.

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It doesn’t do to underrate Coburn. When we looked at this trade from a Lightning perspective earlier in the day, it was clear why that team valued the defensive rearguard, who still has a year left on his deal. He’s a very good player who performs well in very tough minutes.

Even so, the return Hextall got was excellent value.

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Radko Gudas seems to have been born to be a Flyer. The Czech defenseman is a physical monster, posting 150-plus penalty minutes in the WHL, NHL and three times in the AHL. He’s only 24 years old, he has some offensive game and NHL Numbers shows that he isn’t even earning seven figures. Most teams would have a spot for him on the roster, though few fanbases seem as well-suited to him as the one in Philly which cheered on the Broad Street Bullies.

In addition to landing a cheap young roster player, Hextall picked up first- and third-round choices in the deep 2015 draft.

The difficult choice here must have been making the decision that Philadelphia needed to go through some short-term pain to realize long-term potential. The loss of Coburn hurts the team a lot, even as his departure eases the salary-cap situation considerably. But once that decision was made, the Flyers did a superb job of raking in assets.

Statistics courtesy of BehindTheNet.ca,Stats.Hockeyanalysis.com and NHL.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.