Valtteri Filppula debuted in the NHL with the Detroit Red Wings in 2005, with a team that was going to imbue him with a respect for playing sound two-way hockey, no matter his instincts or inclinations.
With Mike Babcock as the Red Wings' head coach, with Nicklas Lindstrom and Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg as the locker room's leaders, Filppula learned early on that, regardless of his natural skills, he couldn't get away with shirking his responsibility to block shots and back-check. Maneuvering around a defenseman, making him look stationary and silly and creating a scoring chance, was great. But for every player on those dynastic Detroit teams, preventing an opponent from putting the puck in the net was at all times the higher priority.
"I'm always trying to be that way, to play well defensively," Filppula said after the Flyers practiced Monday, five days after they acquired him at the trade deadline from the Tampa Bay Lightning. "Obviously, you always want to do as well as possible offensively, too, so whenever there's a chance, you want to take advantage of those situations."
He has such a chance now, with the Flyers, maybe the last great one he'll get in his career. Already in Filppula's first two games, in the midst of a desperate push for the postseason, coach Dave Hakstol has made him the team's second-line center, putting him between Jake Voracek and Brayden Schenn, playing him on the power play, signaling that Filppula will get a shot to be the kind of scorer that he really wasn't allowed to be in Tampa Bay.
"I hope so," said Filppula, 32, who scored a game-tying third-period goal Thursday in the Flyers' 2-1 victory over the Florida Panthers. "I mean, I think I'm playing right now with two offensively gifted guys. I'm expecting _ at least, I hope _ to help the team out that way as well."
For anyone who saw the Filppula-for-Mark Streit trade that general manager Ron Hextall struck last week as a meaningless move, it's important to understand what the deal revealed about the Flyers' thinking. If they genuinely regarded Sean Couturier as a bona fide second-line center, they wouldn't have made the trade at all. That's the cold reality here for Couturier.
Although he said Monday that the left MCL sprain that he suffered in November _ which forced him to miss 16 games _ hampered him throughout January and February, it's clear now that the Flyers see him as little more than a third-line center and penalty-killer. They see him as a defensive-minded forward who isn't likely to blossom beyond that, and it's telling that they were willing to take on Filppula and the $5 million he'll count against the salary cap next season, the final year of his contract.
"Maybe down the road, I can be a difference-maker," Couturier said. "Sometimes you need some other guys out of the top two lines to score. I'll try to fill that role."
It's a role with which Filppula has been familiar, and the Flyers are banking that, with a bit more freedom, he can break out of it. At first glance, that theory would seem a Hail Mary. Yes, Filppula scored 23 goals with the Red Wings in 2011-12 and 25 with the Lightning in 2013-14. Those were his biggest, best seasons, and they're deep in the distance now. His production has dropped steadily since: from 25 goals to 12 in '14-15 to eight last season to eight this season. There's no getting around that downward trend, but in fairness to Filppula, those numbers alone do omit some necessary context, with respect to his career and to the Flyers' roster.
Of the NHL's top eight players in average power-play ice time per game this season, five are Flyers: Shayne Gostisbehere, Brayden Schenn, Wayne Simmonds, Claude Giroux, and Jake Voracek. Each of them averages at least 3 minutes, 43 seconds of man-advantage action per game, which speaks to how top-heavy the Flyers are is when it comes to scoring goals. Filppula's highest single-season average is 3:23. This season, he's averaging more time on the penalty kill (1:59) than he is on the power play (1:55). More, his average penalty-killer time increased in each of his four years with Tampa, and his average power-play time decreased in each of the last three years. Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov, Tyler Johnson, Victor Hedman _ Lightning coach Jon Cooper had plenty of firepower at his disposal. He didn't have to demand that Filppula provide more.
It's a safe bet, then, that Hextall saw a potentially untapped resource here: a playmaker who lately hasn't been given much opportunity to make plays.
"Judging things off what we see here, he's been excellent for us in a two-way role," Hakstol said. "He's made a lot of plays, and there are a lot of subtleties in his game that people don't recognize. Those are the plays that he does, some of the plays that he keeps alive, the smart, skilled plays."
The Flyers have 18 games left on their schedule, starting Tuesday night in Buffalo against the Sabres, against another team reaching for that second wild-card berth in the Eastern Conference, and they shouldn't expect Filppula to be some kind of savior. He's not that. He's a good player getting the kind of chance he hasn't had in a while _ the chance to make those smart and skillful plays, the chance to produce _ and they just need him to be what they believe him to be: better than what they already have.
