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Meltzer's Musings: Flyers Best Trades |
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The jury will be out for quite some time on how well the Mike Richards and Jeff Carter trades will work out for the Flyers in the long run. Although the topic of best/worst trades in franchise history has been written about by others many times over, I have never specifically blogged on the subject.
Personally, I would not include the original Eric Lindros trade on either the best or the worst list, although a vehement argument could be made either way and neither side will ever convince the other. The way I view it, the Flyers had two courses they could have chosen at the time they sent a king's ransom to Quebec for the rights to Lindros, but I honestly don't think in retrospect that the alternative path would have led to a Stanley Cup, either.
The fact that the Flyers did not win a Cup during the Lindros era had much more to do with a defense corps that wasn't quite deep enough to withstand injuries and goaltending that wasn't quite good enough to steal low-scoring games in the playoffs than it was about anything number 88 was doing wrong.
The extremely heavy price the Flyers paid to acquire Lindros set back their rebuilding process and prolonged their stretch of missing the playoffs to five years. On the flip side, Lindros won a Hart Trophy, was a finalist another time and was the third leading points-per-game player in NHL history (behind only Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux) over the course of his career in Philadelphia. I have a real problem with classifying Lindros' acquisition as belonging among any "worst" list. Love him or hate him, Lindros was a legitimate franchise player.
For those who say Lindros came up small in the postseason, be aware that he had 24 goals and 57 points in 50 playoff games with the Flyers; a 1.14 points-per-game average. By way of comparison, Peter Forsberg was virtually identical in his playoff career at 1.13 PPG. Joe Sakic averaged 1.09 PPG. Steve Yzerman averaged 0.94 PPG. Mark Messier averaged 1.25 for his playoff career but most if it came in the higher scoring 1980s to early 1990s, while Mario Lemieux averaged 1.21 PPG in his playoff runs after the Penguins two Stanley Cups and an incredible 1.67 PPG for his entire playoff career.
Bottom line: During the era in which he played -- one of gradually declining leaguewide scoring year by year, even among its superstars -- Lindros produced about as reliably as any player in the league. If you subtracted Lindros from the Flyers, put in Forsberg, Mike Ricci, Steve Duchesne and Chris Simon and assume the rest of the Philly roster would have been the same (John LeClair and Eric Desjardins rather than Mark Recchi, Paul Coffey acquired in 1996-97, etc), guess what? I still think the club would have come up a bit short of the Cup because of its goaltending and injuries on the blueline.
At any rate, I also don't think the original Lindros trade can be included on the best trade list. The club paid such a heavy price to acquire Lindros' rights that it really put itself and a player into an almost impossible position to make up for it.
The fact that the Flyers still became a Cup contender from 1994-95 onward during the Lindros years is a testament both to what an excellent building block he really was plus the fact that the club made several astute drafting decisions in 1990, 1991 and 1993 and that Bob Clarke made some excellent trades in the first year or two of his second GM tenure. The Lindros trade alone did not build a contender. It provided a centerpiece.
Here are my top five Flyers trades of all time. I'll do the worst trades list on Sunday (no blog tomorrow):
1) Bernie Parent & 1973 2nd Round draft choice (Larry Goodenough) from Toronto Maple Leafs for Doug Favell and 1973 1st Round draft choice (Bob Neely): No Bernie return to orange and black, no Stanley Cup parades in 1974 and 1975. As an added bonus, Larry "Izzy" Goodenough was a serviceable starting defenseman for the Flyers for a few years.
2) John LeClair, Eric Desjardins and Gilbert Dionne from Montreal Canadiens for Mark Recchi and a 1995 3rd Round draft choice (Martin Hohenberger): The trade that turned the Lindros-era Flyers into a playoff club. The team struggled out of the gates after the lockout, and Clarke pulled the trigger on a blockbuster trade with the Habs. Incidentally, the knee-jerk reaction of many Flyers fans at the time the trade was made was that it was a bad trade. No one could have known that the "underachieving" LeClair would immediately blossom into a premier power forward. The key to the trade was always the steady Desjardins. Dionne was expected to provide a little scoring depth along with LeClair to partially make up for the loss of Recchi.
3) Mark Howe and a 1983 3rd Round draft choice (Derrick Smith) from Hartford Whalers for Ken Linseman, Greg Adams, 1983 1st Round draft choice (David Jensen) and 1983 3rd Round draft choice (Leif Karlsson): This was another blockbuster. The Flyers had to give up their leading scorer from the previous season (Linseman, coming off a 92-point campaign), a tough and gritty prospect that Keith Allen was reluctant to part with (Adams) plus a first round pick. Of course, as it turned out, the return justified the price tag. The Flyers ended up with their best defenseman in franchise history; a future Hockey Hall of Famer who was just about to hit his prime as a defenseman after converting from an All-Star caliber winger a few years earlier. Meanwhile, Smith proved to be a decent role player during the Mike Keenan era.
4) Rod Brind'Amour and Dan Quinn from St.Louis Blues for Ron Sutter and Murray Baron: Sutter served the Flyers well but it was time for him to move on. He had grown disgruntled with the direction of the organization and was pressing too much after being named captain (of a sinking ship). Baron had a long career as a solid defensive defenseman. Meanwhile, the Flyers got in return a burgeoning iron man of a player on whom the Blues had inexplicably soured in his disappointing second NHL season. Brind'Amour anchored the Flyers' second line after the acquisition of Lindros and was another building block around which the teams of the mid-to-late 1990s was constructed. Philly did not really want Quinn -- a one-way player with off-ice question marks at the time -- but St. Louis just wanted to unload him. He lasted one year in Philly. Quinn actually played better in his second stint in Philly (in a January 1996 cash transaction with Ottawa following a sports hernia injury to Mikael Renberg) than during his first go-round.
5) Murray Craven and Joe Paterson from Detroit for Darryl Sittler: The Flyers could have handled this trade better from a human standpoint-- veteran star Sittler was traded on the same day he was to be named the team's new captain and received a terse message from new GM Bob Clarke. From a hockey standpoint, however, the trade worked out very well. Sittler was in decline and would retire following one injury-riddled and unproductive year in Detroit. Craven, meanwhile, went on to have a highly underrated NHL career. His name rarely gets mentioned on any "best Flyers players" lists but he was a very reliable player who could be penciled in for 20-30 goals and 60-75 points per season depending on his health and games played.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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