A couple of mid-level defensemen acquired days before the deadline even approached proved to be all the Flyers would do to tweak their team heading into the stretch run of the season. Paul Holmgren and his crew stood pat on Monday afternoon as the trade deadline came and went. Homer's statement on opting to stick with the guys they already have in the dressing room:
"We received some calls about a few of our players with some scenarios that we talked about, but nothing really made sense for us either in the short term or the long term," said Holmgren.
"I think we stated all along that anything we do needed to make sense both ways for us and nothing really came up. We made our moves a couple weeks ago and I think adding size and experience on defense that we were looking for with the absence of Chris Pronger for the rest of this year, we felt good with our group."
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It proved to be a market with few highly coveted players on teams who appeared to be asking too much in return. A lackluster day for trade junkies, but a good day for those who liked the core parts of this current Flyers team, including much rumored trade bait JVR.
How do you feel after the trade deadline passed without the Flyers making a splash?
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More from the Homer conference call:
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Q: Were you getting a lot of calls today about James van Riemsdyk?
We received some calls about some of our players, with some scenarios that we talked about. But nothing really made sense for us in the short term or in the long term. I think we’ve stated here all along that anything we do needs to make sense both ways for us, and nothing really came up. We made our moves a couple weeks ago and I think adding the size and experience on defense that we were looking for with the absence of Chris Pronger for the rest of this year… we felt good with our group. We really didn’t go into this trade deadline, since we made those two deals for Pavel and Nicklas, we didn’t really go in with anything that really felt we needed to do. We like our team and we were quite comfortable coming out of it like we did without doing anything more today
Q: So you’re not disappointed?
Absolutely not. Not at all. A couple weeks ago we felt we lacked some things on our back end just because of the absence of Chris, and we addressed those issues without giving up anyone off our team. I like our team. I think we’re a team that obviously the group for the most part has been together all year. We’ve put some young guys into the lineup over the course of the year, and we like our team. We like the direction we’re heading and we didn’t want to do anything to disrupt anything long-term for sure.
Q: Does the goals-against still concern you?
Yeah. It’s a function of how we’re playing. We’re still a little loosey-goosey from time to time, and obviously our goaltending needs to be better. I think the coaches and the players have spent a great deal of time going over how we’re playing, and we’re trying to tighten things up. That’s a situation that the team is addressing on a daily basis, and you hope getting down here where we’ve got 21 games left, we’ll start to tighten it up and play