The Philadelphia Flyers have a new contract to announce for one of their top young defenders. Cam York has signed a two-year, $3.2MM contract carrying a $1.6MM cap hit. CapFriendly reports the structure of his deal is as follows:
2023-24: $1.3MM salary, $300K signing bonus
2024-25: $1.6MM salary
York, 22, set a career-high in points with the Flyers in 2022-23. His 20 points in 54 games ranked fifth among Flyers defenders in total, but his 0.37 points per game put him second to only Tony DeAngelo.
The team’s 14th overall pick in 2019, York is a shoo-in to take over a full-time top-four role after the team dealt away Ivan Provorov (and, presumably, DeAngelo) this summer. It’s largely assumed the team signed veteran Marc Staal in free agency to serve as a partner/mentor for York, who did average over 19 minutes per game last season and posted rather high-end two-way results.
With Provorov out of the picture, it seems like just a matter of time until York is Philadelphia’s de facto number-one defenseman. If that happens sometime within the next two seasons, this is obviously an incredibly short-term value signing by general manager Daniel Briere.
He’s the second promising young Flyer to sign a two-year deal today, though, joining center Noah Cates. While getting Cates and York locked in until 2025 for a combined $4.225MM is a solid piece of work, they’ll likely both be due gigantic raises two summers from now, something that could be tough to negotiate even with a rising salary cap.
York will be an RFA again in 2025, and he’ll be due a $1.6MM qualifying offer. In the meantime, though, the focus rests on development for the 5-foot-11, 172-pound defenseman.
He would have to have PP time to be effective
York ran PP2 behind DeAngelo last season. With TDA out the door, you’d have to think he gets PP1 minutes. York, Atkinson, Couturier, Konecny, Tippett?