Well, it looks like one of the few bright spots on this team will be gone for the time being.

The Philadelphia Flyers announced Friday morning that they have sent junior defenseman Emil Andrae back to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms of the AHL.

Transaction: We have loaned defender Emil Andrae back to the club @LVPhantoms (AHL).

— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) December 20, 2024

In short, the 22-year-old blueliner has been one of the team’s best defenders this season. Almost immediately when he was recalled earlier this year, everyone could see the improvement in his physicality, agility and overall awareness on the ice compared to when he was brought into the fold from training camp last season. In the 20 games he played, Andrae scored one goal and collected five points while averaging 19:18 minutes of ice time per game and at one point playing a power play session. But lately he hasn’t felt the same spark that he did when he arrived in Philadelphia.

Andrae was a healthy player for three straight games and then was back in the lineup for Thursday night’s game against the Los Angeles Kings. Unfortunately, he didn’t play a great game and could have had his worst performance on the ice in orange and black.

But why send Andrae down now? The most obvious reason is in the paragraph above. Head coach John Tortorella didn’t like what he’d seen in recent weeks and felt he deserved to sit – as he recently did with Cam York, Egor Zamula and countless other young players. And in his first chance to get back into his coach’s good graces, Andrae scored no points, posted a plus/minus of zero (honestly, not bad) and had two shots on goal in a 7-3 loss. He made a few mistakes that gave the Kings chances to score, so overall it was a pretty bad game.

So if Andrae isn’t going to play for the Flyers – or Tortorella sees this as a time to take a step back and move forward – now is the time to release him. The Flyers still have two games left before the holiday break, but if Andrae isn’t going to be on the blue line anyway, they can of course trade him off waivers, and over the holiday break they can accumulate some cap space for future moves this season .

Since teams gain cap space every day over the course of the season while Andrae is out in the AHL, the Flyers will receive about $4,700 in more cap space each day to use at the trade deadline (if we’re doing the math correctly). The Flyers’ first game after the holiday break is in eight days, so once again the math is bad, but that’s about $37,600 in cap space they can create by simply sending Andrae down for two games.

Now he could last longer down there. If the coaching staff still doesn’t like what they see with the Phantoms, he can stay down and the Flyers can just continue to have Egor Zamula on the blue line. And Erik Johnson is still hanging around.

The Flyers largely believe they won’t have Andrae in the NHL unless he deserves it, and in their eyes he hasn’t played well enough to beat out the other players they can’t release without waiver claims. That’s most likely her perspective on the whole thing.