After multiple rumors and reports of a pending trade call that ended up not happening, the Philadelphia Flyers parted ways with defenseman Tony DeAngelo by buying out the one year remaining on his contract. He was sent on his ways to go sign with whatever team he wanted to while the Flyers got hit with a minor financial penalty for two seasons.
On Monday, the Carolina Hurricanes – who was going to receive him via trade before it fell through, according to multiple reports – signed him to a one-year, $1.675-million contract. DeAngelo returned to where he got so many points that he received some votes for the Norris Trophy, and the Canes are hoping he can do some of that again within their highly structured system.
DeAngelo spoke with local media the following day about returning to South Carolina, and he had to speak on why exactly he was bought out from his contract and divorced from Philadelphia.
“Obviously the coach and I wound up not fitting together, I guess that would be the main reason for leaving the team and being a free agent again,” DeAngelo told reporters.
Throughout the second half of the season – and more specifically in the final weeks – DeAngelo and head coach John Tortorella seemed to have have a disagreement when it came to evaluation of his play. The defenseman was brutal in every defensive aspect of the game of hockey and it came to a boiling point after the trade deadline. DeAngelo was a healthy scratch for the last few games of the regular season and the writing was on the wall that a split was going to happen.
It ended up having to be a buyout and there is an obvious trend for DeAngelo where teams bet big on his offensive game but just end up not being able to live with how poor he is with not allowing the opposition to walk all over him. Of course there is that, and then the reported off-ice issues that has been repeated ad nauseum. According to DeAngelo, it was nothing personal, though.
“I’ve been bought out again which is disappointing, but there were different factors that led to that a little bit,” he said. “As far as controversy I feel like that’s all in the past. I guess there was some controversy this year you could call it, just not being on the same page as the head coach. But there was no personal feelings, nothing personal happened or something big happened to lead to anything, it was kind of just a mutual disagreement on a bunch of things that I won’t get into.”
No reason to speculate on what exactly the player and the team disagreed on, but we know for sure that he wasn’t playing up to snuff and the Flyers preferred younger prospects getting minutes ahead of him.
Now the one-way blueliner is off to his old team and a coaching staff that he’s familiar with and has success with.
“The way I got along with Rod is more than I got along with any other coach I’ve played for in my career,” DeAngelo said. “But that’s the kind of guy he is and I feel like we were a just good match for one another, so just looking forward to getting back in that situation.”
Tortorella and Brind’Amour are fairly opposite coaches – the Carolina bench boss is known as a “player’s coach” while Tortorella has more of an authoritarian approach to running his teams – but both know exactly what they want from the team and DeAngelo just feels like another mid-season problem waiting to happen.
Have fun in Carolina, dude.
