Philadelphia Flyers: Linus Sandin signing will have domino effect

The Philadelphia Flyers are weeks, hopefully not months, away from returning to game action. But they did consummate a deal for the future by bringing in Swedish forward Linus Sandin.

The Philadelphia Flyers haven’t had too much success with signing international free agents recently. Does anybody even remember the underwhelming tenures of Roman Lyubimov and Evgeny Medvedev? Didn’t think so. But you can’t let that stop you from going after a player when you feel he could be a great fit on your team, which is what the Flyers are banking on with their signing of Swedish standout Linus Sandin.

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Let’s not get crazy, though. Despite his nice offensive showing (for the Swedish League) this season, Sandin is not expected to be a top-six forward. You don’t sign a guy to a one-year, $925,000 deal if that’s the expectation. But the Flyers did help the bottom ranks of their forward group, and I’m thinking that Sandin will come in somewhere between the offensive production and overall usefulness of Michael Raffl and a hopefully healthy Oskar Lindblom.

That translates to third line minutes in a best case scenario, and I believe the Flyers would be thrilled if they could trust Sandin with about 14 minutes a night while getting around 20 goals and/or 40 points and a nightly display of the kind of physical game he’s supposed to be bringing with him across the pond.

The ramifications of this will be felt in the team’s bottom six, and it likely means that one or possibly both of Tyler Pitlick and Derek Grant will be allowed to depart as an unrestricted free agent at season’s end. Pitlick had a very productive first season in Philadelphia, but that means he’ll deservedly need a bump from his current $1 million salary. And Grant will probably get even more of a raise from the $700,000 he’s making after setting career highs in goals and points. He looked good in his brief time as a Flyer after coming over at the trade deadline, but we may have already seen the last of him in orange and black. The Flyers’ other deadline addition, Nate Thompson, will be gone as well, unless he’s willing to stay at or even take a cut on his $1 million salary.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see all three of the aforementioned UFAs leave town to clear the necessary space for Sandin, as well as creating full-time jobs for Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost. Nicolas Aube-Kubel is already a lock for bottom-six duty, and the Flyers can mix and match with youngsters that we’ve already seen like Connor Bunnaman and Carsen Twarynski, along with possible newcomers in Wade Allison and Tanner Laczynski. And this is saying nothing of stalwarts Scott Laughton and Raffl. It’s a pretty nice group to have for offensive support, penalty killing, and eating up some minutes to keep the first two lines fresh.

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The Flyers’ top lines will stay intact for next season, and that’s the most important thing. But you have to show some depth as well, something that the signing of Sandin can really help with. Flyers fans should be looking forward to seeing the soon to be 24-year old up with the big club next season. In the meantime, it’d be nice if we get a playoff run out of the current team at some point before we have to shift our focus to 2020-21.

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