Philadelphia Flyers call up Cam York from AHL Lehigh Valley

The Philadelphia Flyers are in the process of trading some young blueliners from their roster before they embark on a four-game road trip that begins Friday. Vegas Golden Knights.

The Flyers have recalled defenseman Cam York and in return transferred defenseman Egor Zamula back to Lehigh Valley, the team announced Thursday afternoon.

This move, on the contrary, has only traded a couple of young defensemen who have either not played hockey at all or tried to prove themselves in the minors. For 21-year-old York, it was the latter.

Entering this season’s training camp, most of York had written on the Flyers’ final blue line to hit the ice in the season opener. So when the young defenseman was finally sent down to the AHL, it came as a mild surprise to most, especially since he just finished his final season in Philadelphia, playing 30 games and not looking out of place at all.

Head coach John Tortorella said around that time during the broadcast that he wanted to see more out of him early in the preseason. The writing was on the wall that York wouldn’t continue seeing his trajectory move forward, and would take a small step back to hopefully take a giant step forward. Well, York has played 20 games in Lehigh Valley and has three goals and 13 points on a pretty bad team that doesn’t score very often (only three teams in the entire AHL have scored fewer goals than the Phantoms have), so that’s a pretty remarkable feat .

With all those minutes logged, we can only assume this Flyers campaign will be more permanent. Why not just take Zamula along for the ride if you just need some extra body?

We assume he’ll take over for Nick Seeler at the bottom pairing, but will likely get significant power-play time as he hopefully blossoms into an agile NHL defenseman who can get involved from behind.

We’ll know more when Tortorella wants to tell us what’s going on with this young guy and where he fits in the lineup. Maybe he’s just ready for a trip with the NHL guys, or maybe he’s here for good. Hopefully the latter because we don’t know how long we can look at the six defensemen the Flyers are using right now.