Elliott returns as Hart’s backup goalie
The nine Flyers lives of Brian Elliott continued Wednesday, as the veteran signed a one-year, $2 million contract to come back as Carter Hart’s mentoring backup goalie.
Elliott, 34, had originally signed a two-year free agency deal worth $5.5 million on July 1, 2017. He was expected to compete with the always-injured Michal Neuvirth and prospect Anthony Stolarz for playing time in Ron Hextall’s rebuilding project while future franchise goalie Hart prepped in junior and the AHL. Injuries changed the timeline. Neuvirth continued to get injured at an astounding rate, and Stolarz had knee injuries knock his career off course. Elliott had injury issues, also. He came back while still hurt to tend goal in a lost Flyers playoff series against Pittsburgh in 2018, and missed quite a bit of time last season with lingering abdominal problems after offseason core muscle surgery.
But through it all, he played in 69 regular season games over his two-season Flyers tenure, posting a record of 34-22-8 with a 2.77 goals-against average and .908 saves percentage.
“I’m just really excited to be back,” Elliott said. “Whenever you sign with a team to begin with, you want to see it through, try to create things and be a part of something special. So it’s been exciting to see some of the moves and acquisitions that have happened lately with the team and I’m excited to be part of that moving forward.”
It seemed that in their search for a backup goalie, for the Flyers it came down to two of the three pending unrestricted free agent veterans they had on their roster, Elliott and Cam Talbot.
“We spoke to quite a few goaltenders this week, quite a few agents for goaltenders this week. We did a lot of due diligence looking into everyone’s background and medical histories, stats, everything we could do,” Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher said Wednesday. “We talked extensively to both Cam and Brian, and I will just comment that Cam indicated to us through his agent that he was looking for a situation where he felt he might play a little bit more than he anticipated playing here. He’s hoping to become a No. 1 goalie again ... so we certainly respect that.”
Not that Elliott would have been choice No. 2...
“We had good conversations with Brian all along,” Fletcher said. “We looked at everything and at the end of the day, we know Brian as well if not better than everybody. We know his medical history, we know how he fits in the room, we know how he fits with Carter, and we know how well he plays. The more we dug, the more we felt comfortable coming back to Brian, and this morning we were able to make it happen.”
Over his 11-year career, which began with the Ottawa Senators and included stops in Colorado (briefly), St. Louis (five seasons) and Calgary (one season), Elliott has 225 NHL victories with a 2.48 GAA and .912 SP.
His best seasons were with the Blues, leading them to the Western Conference finals in 2016 after going 23-8-6 with a 2.07 GAA and a league-leading .930 saves percentage in the regular season.
It was Talbot who originally seemed right to be in Elliott’s shoes next season. While Elliott was trying to recover from his injury problems last February, Fletcher swapped Stolarz to Edmonton to bring in Talbot, whose excellent early career resume was supplemented by a friendship with the young Hart, an offseason training partner.
Talbot, only 31, was just a couple of seasons from looking like Henrik Lundqvist’s successor in New York. But the Rangers had kept their kingly veteran and traded Talbot to the Oilers, who signed him to a three-year contract extension worth $4 million per season in Jan. 2016.
That contract now expired, and his performances with Edmonton and the Flyers late last season uninspiring, it will be Talbot who will hit the market in an uncertain position rather than the older Elliott.
As for Fletcher, he didn’t have much of a choice in search of a Hart backup.
The list of unrestricted free agent goalies was quite unattractive, aside from the two highest priced names, former Flyer and standout Blue Jackets starter Sergei Bobrovsky, who is expected to draw multi-year bids in excess of $7- or $8 million per season, and Colorado’s Semyon Varlamov, whose signing ticket might only be a couple of mill short of Bob’s big draw, if that.
Then there was aged, overpriced Mike Smith, the overpriced and rusty Talbot, the probably pastit Cam Ward, the perpetually injured Neuvirth and the recently lousy Antti Niemi. With Talbot turning him down and exhausted with Neuvirth’s injury woes, Fletcher considered Elliott an obvious choice.
Cheap career backup Curtis McElhinney, most recently with Carolina, the Islanders’ Robin Lehner and late-season Carolina surprise Petr Mrazek, who badly failed an audition with the Flyers in 2018, were other options that didn’t excite.
Instead, Fletcher got Brian Elliott for backup money. Now all he has to do is prove he’s healthy, and prove to be a positive influence on his 21-yearold crease mate.
“He battled for a while there, but he came back healthy at the end and I thought he played quite well,” Fletcher said of Elliott. “Our team started to struggle a little bit down the stretch. I don’t think we gave an awful lot of support to whatever goaltender we put in the net; particularly the last 10-15 games, we got a little loose defensively. But physically, he looked good, he moved well, he felt good, he played some great games ... and at the end of the year, knock on wood, he was healthy. I spoke to him again today and he feels great.”