The Hurricanes are working to complete a trade for Flyers defenseman Tony DeAngelo, league sources confirmed to The Athletic. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman first reported news of the trade. Here’s what you need to know:
- The Flyers would retain 50 percent on DeAngelo and get a late-round prospect from Carolina in the deal, which likely will be completed Sunday, per league sources.
- DeAngelo, 27, notched 42 points (11 goals, 31 assists) for Philadelphia last season.
- He joined the Flyers in July 2022 in a trade from Carolina in exchange for draft picks after one season with the Hurricanes.
The Athletic’s instant analysis:
Why are the Flyers making this move?
The Flyers are trading DeAngelo because they’ve decided that they’re done with him. It’s really that simple.
When the Flyers shipped out a package of three draft picks last summer (a second, third and fourth) to add DeAngelo on Day 2 of the draft, the thinking on Chuck Fletcher’s part was simple. They needed a quality RHD partner for Ivan Provorov and they wanted to fix their horrid power play. So they ponied up for hometown boy DeAngelo, who had just completed a bounceback season with Carolina and signed him to a two-year, $10 million extension.
The problem? DeAngelo didn’t click with Provorov, as that experiment ended by December, and failed to improve the power play, which again finished dead-last in the NHL in 2022-23. In addition, his defensive results — never a DeAngelo strength in the first place — moved into truly horrific territory in Philadelphia. He posted an ugly minus-27 and finished with the third-worst isolated impact on expected goal prevention among regular NHL defensemen, per Evolving-Hockey’s RAPM model. By the end of the season, coach John Tortorella was so fed up with DeAngelo that he scratched him for the final five games, including one contest where Tortorella dressed just five defensemen rather than put DeAngelo into the starting lineup.
The writing, in other words, was on the wall.
But DeAngelo just didn’t have much in the way of league-wide value after his 2022-23 performance, as teams didn’t deem him worth his $5 million cap hit. The Flyers could have chosen to hang onto DeAngelo in the hopes that he would rehabilitate his value with a bounceback 2023-24 campaign, possibly making him a desired trade deadline target as a rental. But new general manager Daniel Briere clearly decided that DeAngelo just wasn’t going to work out in Philadelphia, and didn’t want to risk a full season of Tortorella openly butting heads with a particularly emotional player.
So they’re sending him back to Carolina — a team that always valued him, but just didn’t believe he was worth the $5 million cap number that he wanted as a restricted free agent this summer. With the Flyers retaining salary in the deal, the Canes get DeAngelo back at a far more palatable number. The Flyers, on the other hand, excise a player from their roster who was never a great fit in the first place and open up another spot in the starting lineup for one of their many young close-to-NHL-ready defense prospects, such as Egor Zamula, Ronnie Attard, Adam Ginning and Helge Grans, who was recently acquired in the trade that sent Provorov to Columbus. — O’Connor
Required reading
(Photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)
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