Flyers goaltender Johan Backlund may have misunderstood the timetable for his recovery from off-season hip surgery but his comments to the European media were absolutely not a case of mistranslation.
In addition to the report on EuroFlyers' blog, this
report Swedish newspaper Dagbladet unambiguously quotes Backlund as saying the exact same thing that appeared in the first English report.
Det tog lite längre tid än jag hade räknat med. Först var det sagt att jag skulle få åka hem och vara två veckor i Sverige. Jag skulle behöva gå på kryckor i två veckor och sedan skulle jag åka tillbaka i Philadelphia. Men nu blev det åtta veckor och jag har varit där borta nästan hela tiden. Åtta veckor var ett litet bakslag...
Translation: "It took a little longer than I'd counted on. First it was said that I'd be get to go home and be two weeks in Sweden. I'd need to be on crutches for two weeks and afterwards I'd go back to Philadelphia. But it became eight weeks and I'd been over there almost the whole time. Eight weeks was a little setback."
Backlund may have been been confused about his recovery timetable or misspoke about the time he was supposed to be on crutches, but the actual reporting in this case is beyond reproach.
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The Flyers are going to face a very difficult salary cap situation over the next two summers.
As things presently stand, the club is going to be in a similar situation to the one the Chicago Blackhawks found themselves in this summer. There are simply too many regular players who will need to be re-signed over the next two offseasons and not nearly enough salary cap space to keep most of the players.
First and foremost, Jeff Carter's contract will determine the club's ability to get other players signed. Carter is entering the final season of his current contract and will be an arbitration-eligible restricted free agent after the season. After the 2011-12 season, he can become an unrestricted free agent.
Here's the biggest problem: Carter currently makes $5 million on the salary cap. Unless the marketplace shifts considerably, he will be in for a significant raise after next season. Even if he has a similarly inconsistent season in 2010-11 to the one he had this past season, the fact that he has UFA leverage after the following season means that it's likely going to stretch the Flyers' cap resources to -- or past -- the breaking point in order to get him signed to a long-term contract in exchange for him giving up UFA eligibility.
Depending on what happens in the Ilya Kovalchuk case, the Flyers' ability to be creative in mitigating Carter's cap hit through an ultra-long-term deal with low salaries in the last few seasons could be limited.
Personally, I am still on the fence as to whether Carter is really worth devoting $7 million of cap space. To me, it all comes back to his streakiness (and I consider him to be a streaky defensive player as well as an offensive player -- when he's in synch, he's effective in all three zones, when he's pressing offensively, he seems to press defensively too). This coming season, Carter will need to display a form closer to the one he showed throughout most of the 2008-09 season than the up-and-down nature of his other NHL seasons.
Although they are not exact comparison players (positional difference, size difference, age/NHL experience difference and defensive expectations), Chicago's Patrick Kane and the Flyers' Carter are similar in the crucial aspect that they both carry the expectation of being the single biggest scoring threat on their respective clubs. Kane currently makes $6.5 million per season on a contract that carries him through the 2014-15 season. Ditto Kane's teammate, Jonathan Toews.
In a previous blog, I traced Carter's inconsistency through last season, breaking it down into his pattern of hot streaks followed by slumps. The blog drew some criticism based on the notion that all players have their ups and downs during the season. While that is certainly true, some players are simply more consistent than others. Last season at least, Kane's level of consistency was remarkable.
In the 2009-10 regular season, Kane's longest pointless droughts were four games (once, games of March 28- April 2), three games (Oct. 14-17), and two games (twice, Oct. 8-10 and Jan. 10-14). In the playoffs, he was held off the board in the first two games of the Stanley Cup Finals and otherwise had single pointless games in the Nashville series (game 3) and Vancouver series (game 5).
On the flip side, during the regular season, Kane had stretches of producing points in 12 of 13 games (Oct 21 - Nov 21), 19 of 21 games (Nov 28.- Jan. 9), 10 of 12 games following the Olympic break (14 of 16 games if you count the four games leading into the break) and points in each of the final five games of the regular season. In the playoffs, he had points in five of the six games against Nashville, five of the six against Vancouver, all four games in the sweep of San Jose and in each of the final four games against the Flyers, including the Cup winning goal and 8 points overall.
When a player produces that consistently, you don't even blink about his cap hit.
If Jeff Carter can approach anything resembling that sort of consistent production during the 2010-11 season, then the Flyers should absolutely do whatever it takes to get him signed to a long-term contract and figure out how to manage the cap in shaping a revised supporting cast around Mike Richards and himself. If not, Carter's next contract will be a major albatross around the team's neck.
After next season, Claude Giroux (currently making $821,667) will be a restricted free agent. If his playoff performance was any indication, he is in the midst of breaking into NHL stardom and will be in line for a big raise -- or an RFA offer sheet that the Flyers will be unable to match because of their cap situation. In addition, Nikolai Zherdev ($2 million) and Ville Leino ($800,000) will be unrestricted free agents.
The following off-season, after the 2011-12 season, both Braydon Coburn ($3.2 million) and Matt Carle ($3.44 million) will be unrestricted free agents and James Van Riemsdyk ($1.65 milion) will be a restricted free agent.
In the meantime, Danny Briere, Scott Hartnell and Kimmo Timonen all have no-trade clauses in their contracts. Even if the players agree to waive it, the return the Flyers will get in a deal will be severely limited. But the club may have to make additional Simon Gagne-like deals simply to have the room to get Carter signed to a long-term contract and potentially keep one or two of the aforementioned players (mostly likely Giroux and one of Coburn or Carle).
Bottom line: The 2010-11 season will probably be the Flyers best shot at the Stanley Cup
for some years to come, and it's all because of the way the club has managed the cap. For that reason alone, I think the Flyers were short-sighted this offseason in not even considering trade offers for Carter -- their most valuable player who could bring back a useful trade return and alleviate some of the impending cap crisis.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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