The Philadelphia Flyers have placed center Boyd Gordon on waivers, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reports (Twitter link).
Gordon is in his first season in Philadelphia after signing a one year, $950K contract on the first day of free agency. However, he has struggled with the Flyers and has played in just 13 games this year due to an upper body injury that cost him 18 games while he also spent considerable time as a healthy scratch. This season, he has just a single goal while averaging only 8:11 of ice time per night.
The 33 year old is in his 13th NHL campaign, having spent time previously with the Capitals, Coyotes (twice), and Oilers. He has 161 career points under his belt (56-105-161).
While those offensive numbers don’t stand out, Gordon has carved out a niche for himself as a faceoff specialist. He has a career 56.9% success rate at the dot and there are typically teams who are comfortable with carrying a high end faceoff player on their fourth line.
The Flyers needed to clear up some cap space in order to activate defenseman Mark Streit off LTIR. GM Ron Hextall confirmed to CSN Philly’s Tim Panaccio (Twitter link) that Streit has been activated and that removing Gordon off the roster (either by a waiver claim tomorrow or being sent to the minors) is the only roster move required to get back into compliance on the salary cap.
Useless signing. I’d rather see a young kid in that AHL spot
It was a low-cost, high-reward potential type of signing.
It didn’t work out and won’t cost the team much… nothing wrong with trying it out as long as you are willing to admit when the ship has sailed and it didn’t work out.
What was the high reward? Gordon has been replacement-level or worse for almost his entire career. He hasn’t cracked 23 points in the last decade, has posted comical, sub-replacement-level CFRel% numbers in his career, and we know now that faceoff wins have limited predicted value for a team’s performance (because a faceoff’s influence on scoring likelihood steadily declines after it occurs, reaching 0 after about 15 seconds).
I don’t really care about the signing if he’s just going to sit in the press box, because I’d rather have him riding the pine than some prospect that would benefit from skating regularly in the AHL, but the move still didn’t make any sense beyond the thought that he could take defensive zone draws. And any assumed benefit behind that strategy falls apart under rudimentary analysis.