Wednesday\u2019s NHL Now show<\/a>, insider Elliotte Friedman shared all the details as we are less than 48 hours away from the trade deadline. Among them, and sort of brought up by him, is the high-ranking NHL insider deciding to throw around some strong and educated speculation surrounding a player on the Flyers.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019ll give you one name that I\u2019ve kind of wondered about for Tampa because \u2014 I haven\u2019t checked his contract situation but he\u2019s still a pretty young guy and he is a right-hand shot and I like him as a player. A guy like Bobby Brink from Philadelphia. That\u2019s the kind of guy I\u2019ve potentially wondered about for Tampa. Right-hand shot, not too big a number, a good little player,\u201d Friedman said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not saying Philly\u2019s looking to get rid of Bobby Brink or anything like that but I think those are the kinds of players that could potentially be available, that Tampa likes. It\u2019s funny, I really try to work hard at the teams that are harder to crack, and Tampa is right at the top of the list. And you go around the league, \u2018What could fit? What could fit?\u2019 That, to me, is a guy that could fit.\u201d<\/p>\n
To make it extremely clear, as if Friedman saying it wasn\u2019t clear enough, this is pure speculation on Friedman\u2019s part. This is not a report that the Lightning are calling up the Flyers front office right now trying to figure out a way to get Brink down to Florida, but it is just the almost perfect player-team pairing that could exist among players that could be moved at the deadline.<\/p>\n
It does make perfect sense. The Lightning have a lengthy track record of bringing the most out of players like Brink. Whether it\u2019s Yanni Gourde, Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat (somewhat), or Blake Coleman, the Lightning do not mind at all if there are forwards handed big opportunities who are under 6-foot tall. Even more skilled players like Brandon Hagel and Anthony Cirelli are up higher in their lineup currently, who are contributing to possibly the best team in the Eastern Conference.<\/p>\n
Brink fits that mold and now thanks to his improved skating ability that we\u2019ve seen in the last few seasons, he can keep up with the players down in Tampa. It\u2019s not hard to imagine the 5-foot-8 winger exploding offensively once handed more of a scoring role than he currently has in Philadelphia and playing for a coach like Jon Cooper.<\/p>\n
Brink is a pending restricted free agent so he would need a new contract this summer, but that\u2019s the Lightning\u2019s problem. Currently, though, Tampa has just over $2.2 million in deadline cap space, so they are able to fit in Brink\u2019s $1.5-million AAV cap hit fairly easily.<\/p>\n
Flyers could clear winger logjam with a Brink trade<\/p>\n
Then, there\u2019s the elephant in the room. The much-discussed logjam on the wings for the Flyers as they prepare for the arrival of Porter Martone as early as five-ish weeks from now. With Travis Konecny, Matvei Michkov, Trevor Zegras, Owen Tippett, Denver Barkey, and also Tyson Foerster when he returns to full health, there are just so many quality wingers for the Flyers and not enough spots in the lineup to go around. And that\u2019s not mentioning rookie Nikita Grebenkin or prospect Alex Bump who could be called up to the team before the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Something has got to give eventually and it could be a problem that is solved as early as this week with a trade like this \u2014 moving Brink to Tampa.<\/p>\n
It is somewhat out of nowhere, but we expect a trade such as this to happen for roster construction purposes and trading Brink, a player who put a whole lot of development time into and suddenly he\u2019s more than just a college-level scorer but a solid middle-six checking forward that can score 40 points in a season, feels like a true possibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trade action around the NHL is heating up as we approach Friday\u2019s trade deadline. We\u2019ve got a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-504705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}