With Wade Allison on waivers, Flyers roster comes into further focus

It had become glaringly obvious that Wade Allison wasn’t going to be in the Philadelphia Flyers’ opening night lineup.

Now, there’s a solid chance that come tomorrow, he won’t be a Flyer at all.

Just after 2 PM EST, the Flyers announced that they had placed Allison on waivers, presumably with the intent of sending him down to the AHL if he clears. But there’s every reason to believe quite a few teams will strongly consider placing a claim.

Allison proved last season that he can stick as a useful NHL veteran, playing in 60 games and scoring 15 points (nine goals, six assists). He’s not exactly young anymore, but at age 25 (he turns 26 next week) he’s in the heart of his prime, and comes with a sweetheart cap hit ($785,000) with only one more year of term. Add in the tools — Allison has size, a powerful shot, good straight-line speed, and a physicality bordering on recklessness — and he very well could be snapped up by another club.

So why did the Flyers waive him?

It was abundantly clear that head coach John Tortorella was frustrated with his propensity for injuries, both nagging and otherwise, culminating in the ridiculous “always hurt” media availability on March 16. But beyond that and his inability to fully seize a consistent role in 2022-23, it really was just a numbers game.

The Flyers entered camp stocked with natural right wings — Allison, Travis Konecny, Owen Tippett, Cam Atkinson, Tyson Foerster, Bobby Brink, Garnet Hathaway. The signing of Hathaway this summer made Allison’s place in the organization especially precarious, given the fact that stylistically, he’s basically finished-product Allison — or, at least what the Flyers were trying to push Allison to become.

Still, Allison is already a useful NHLer, and despite his advanced age, has the potential to be more than that. If he is indeed claimed, it’s not difficult to envision a scenario where he clicks in a new environment and turns himself into a 20-goal-per-year power forward in the Troy Brouwer mold.

But it’s unclear whether that was ever going to happen in Philadelphia, especially after injury ruined the season (2021-22) that in retrospect was his best chance at making himself an indispensable part of the club’s future. He returned in 2022-23 and made the big club, but new coach Tortorella spent most of last season imploring Allison to play an extreme north/south, simple style befitting a fourth liner, with Torts once commenting that he was going to “east/west (himself) out of the lineup.” He also impressed upon Allison to adopt a more professional demeanor, which Allison did his best to do, cutting his hair and toning down his naturally gregarious personality a bit at the rink.

The Flyers, in other words, were asking him to change a lot of what makes Wade Allison Wade Allison, both on and off the ice. He very well could benefit from a move to a team that encourages him to let his hair down, both figuratively and literally.

Assuming Allison is gone — either to another organization or the AHL — Friday’s move does open up a clear path to a final 23-man Flyers’ roster, however. And it’s a roster that could include quite a few of the kids.

Operating under the assumption that Felix Sandström will be waived sometime this weekend in anticipation of being sent down by the Monday roster deadline — Tortorella already announced this week that Sam Ersson had won the backup netminder job — and Allison isn’t long for the roster, that leaves the Flyers at 23 players.

It’s a fully compliant roster, both in terms of total of players, and the salary cap. In fact, even fully counting Ryan Ellis’ $6.25 million cap hit, the Flyers remain about $1.67 million below the $83.5 million ceiling, meaning that they’ll be able to bank cap space through the season in anticipation of the deadline, giving them additional trade flexibility, particularly as a third-party retention service.

And it would be a roster that includes all of Tyson Foerster, Bobby Brink, Egor Zamula and Emil Andrae.

So, barring an unexpected roster move over the next 72-ish hours, the kids look like they’re going to make the team. Now, it’s onto the next question: How do they all get regular playing time?

The defense corps, after all, already has six NHL veterans in Cam York (kind of), Travis Sanheim, Rasmus Ristolainen, Marc Staal, Nick Seeler and Sean Walker. As for the forwards, there’s only one obvious spot available for Foerster and Brink in the top-nine, and Tortorella confirmed on the record today after practice that he will not be breaking up the fourth line of Nicolas Deslauriers, Ryan Poehling and Garnet Hathaway to move someone like Laughton down to Line 4 and open up another spot.

“They’re staying together,” he replied. “So something else has to give, right? If need be, something else gives, I’ll put it that way.”

What might that “something else” be? The waiving of Allison was part of it. But if Tortorella’s comments on Friday are any indication, we also very well may be in for some heavy rotations to start the season.

Tortorella was asked directly if the Flyers would be open to a Foerster/Brink rotation, meaning that they would essentially trade off games, with Foerster starting Game 1 and then Brink checking in for Game 2 — basically keeping the camp competition going for a few extra weeks.

He notably didn’t rule out the possibility.

“No, I don’t think it has to be every game (that they’ll play in order to stay up),” he said. “That’s one avenue, if we feel the both of them deserve to be here, that’s an avenue we can go to.”

Defense rotations would be more complex, given the fact that there isn’t a single obvious spot available in the starting lineup, assuming that Ristolainen — who was a late scratch in the preseason finale due to what has been called a minor injury — is ready to go next week. But Tortorella and the Flyers could find a way to give Zamula and Andrae regular starts, as long as they prove willing to sit veterans like Staal, Seeler and Walker on a consistent basis to accommodate them.

The trick, of course, is staying committed enough to the overarching goal of playing the kids to ensure that they actually play, and don’t merely sit in the press box for weeks at a time until GM Daniel Briere decides they better get in some games and sends them to the minors. After all, Tortorella didn’t shy away from the fact that the club won’t hesitate to shuttle players back and forth between Philadelphia and Allentown on a regular basis this season.

“I want you to understand: we want to play the kids, we do,” he affirmed. “But if we’re putting these young players in a spot that we think is hurting their development, they will go down. And those are the decisions we’re gonna have to make weekly as we go through it.”

It’s going to be a season-long balancing act, between playing the prospects enough in the NHL to develop them, returning some to the minors if they’re in need of confidence boosts, and then making sure the veterans play enough to retain trade value and work to help construct the culture and identity the braintrust feels is essential to returning the Flyers to relevancy.

Still, if all of Foerster, Brink, Zamula and Andrae do make the final roster come Monday, it’s a promising early sign that the new-era Flyers are for real in terms of committing to the announced rebuild, at least organizationally.

They may come to regret the waiving of Wade Allison down the road, if he carves out a role as a quality middle-sixer on another club. But the organization is clearly far more focused on developing the next round of prospects than trying to squeeze value out of an aging one from a previous generation of them. If today’s move does truly help them to better do the former, then punting on the latter becomes easier to swallow.