The Philadelphia Flyers’ rough start just got uglier.
Before Saturday afternoon’s game in Boston, the team announced a wave of injury updates that leaves them shorthanded in a hurry. Travis Konecny and Cam York are both day-to-day, Rasmus Ristolainen has been placed on injured reserve retroactive to Oct. 3, Helge Grans has been activated from Injured, Non-Roster, and Nikita Grebenkin underwent successful back surgery.
That’s a lot to absorb for a team that is already sitting at 0-3-2.
Konecny and York will both miss the weekend back-to-back, which starts against the Bruins and continues Sunday night at home against the Hurricanes. Konecny has again been the Flyers’ most productive scorer early, sitting atop the team with three points, all assists, through five games. He appeared to suffer a knee injury in Thursday night’s loss to the Ottawa Senators, and losing him now is a serious hit to a lineup that badly needs stability.
He may have his critics, but Konecny is still one of the few Flyers who can be counted on in the top nine, and usually the top six, on a nightly basis. Without him, Philadelphia has one less player capable of driving any kind of consistent offense.
York’s absence hurts in a different way. His start hasn’t exactly been clean, particularly on a blue line that has struggled as a whole, but he’s still been eating major minutes.
He’s averaging 21:49 per game through five contests, second on the team behind Travis Sanheim’s 24:11. If the upper-body issue has been bothering him for a while, that would at least explain some of the early-season drag.
Either way, the Flyers are now without another defenseman they can trust to handle NHL minutes.
Ristolainen’s situation adds another layer of strain. He was dealing with an apparent hand injury after last weekend’s game against the Hurricanes, left the contest, came back for one shift, and hasn’t played since.
It’s another frustrating break for a player who has had plenty of injury trouble in the past. He scored one of Philadelphia’s six goals this season and was averaging 18:17 per game.
With Ristolainen unavailable, Grans is back in the mix and should step right into the lineup Saturday in Boston. The right-shot defenseman logged 14:28 per game across his first six NHL appearances last season and finished with one assist, five shots on goal, five blocked shots, four hits, two takeaways, and eight giveaways.
The bigger picture for the Flyers’ defense is simple: it’s thin, and it just got thinner. Travis Sanheim, Jamie Drysdale, Nick Seeler, David Jiricek, Simon Benoit, and Grans are now the group tasked with getting through at least the next two games. Philadelphia had already been looking for help on the back end, and this kind of injury pileup could push Danny Briere to act sooner rather than later.
Grebenkin’s update was the toughest one to read. The forward has been managing a vague injury for most of the past year, and now there’s a clearer answer: a back problem that required surgery.
He tried to fight through it, even asking teammates to hit him in practice, but after taking a body in a preseason game, things worsened. The Flyers say he’ll be out for four months, and if everything goes well, there’s still hope he can return for the later part of the season.
The morning skate in Boston showed just how patched together things have become. The Flyers lined up with Zegras-Dvorak-Foerster on the top line, Tippett-Couturier-Michkov behind them, Barkey-Cates-Martone on the third unit, and Bunting-Acciari-Wilson on the fourth. On defense, Sanheim-Drysdale, Seeler-Jiříček, and Grans-Benoit were the pairs, with Vladař in net.
Not exactly ideal.
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There is still a sense that certain combinations are starting to take hold, even as the results have not followed yet. The projected lineup shows the coaching staff leaning on some familiar pairings and trying to stabilize both ends of the ice, with the next question being whether those choices can finally translate into something tangible in a difficult building against an opponent that already has its footing. [Read more 🡒]