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Bob Ford: On draft day, Flyers steal Sixers' thunder

It was a strange and tumultuous day on Thursday for Philadelphia's two winter professional teams, with the one needing the most help not doing anything very surprising, and the one that is much closer to a championship doing little that wasn't a surprise.

The Sixers stood pat and drafted Nikola Vucevic, while the Flyers made moves to sign Ilya Bryzgalov. (AP Photos)
The Sixers stood pat and drafted Nikola Vucevic, while the Flyers made moves to sign Ilya Bryzgalov. (AP Photos)Read more

It was a strange and tumultuous day on Thursday for Philadelphia's two winter professional teams, with the one needing the most help not doing anything very surprising, and the one that is much closer to a championship doing little that wasn't a surprise.

The 76ers can't start making major trades until their new ownership is in place. The Flyers, as usual, can't stop making trades until they have new ownership. And that part probably will never happen.

It should have been a spotlit kind of evening for the Sixers, as they weighed the 16th pick in the NBA draft, but the Flyers shoved them into the shadows with a pair of deals that disposed of their leading scorer and their team captain. That and the small matter of taking the salary space and signing new goalie Ilya Bryzgalov to a nine-year, $51 million contract. Sure hope he's good.

As the waves from those moves were still crashing onshore, the Sixers dropped a 6-foot-11 pebble in the pond by taking Nikola Vucevic with their draft pick. He is a center, they need a center, and now they merely need to get lucky and have him develop into a special center. It was a good pick, but it will take time to find out if it was a great one.

For now, the Sixers have to settle for quiet improvement while their counterparts at the Wells Fargo Center can afford to operate a little differently.

Making splashy trades and engineering dramatic changes in direction are nothing new for the Flyers. Trade the captain? Mike Richards was the fifth captain traded by the franchise, a list that started early with first-ever captain Lou Angotti. Get rid of the leading goal scorer? The Flyers are nothing if not confident of their ability to replace anyone, including Jeff Carter.

This is a franchise that swings big, whether trading for the rights to Eric Lindros, going after a fading Peter Forsberg, rolling the dice on goalie Ray Emery, bringing in outsider Ken Hitchcock to fix things, whatever. It is a long list of bold moves, none of which have yielded a Stanley Cup trophy in the last 36 years, but bold nonetheless.

Thursday was out of control, but it wasn't out of character. And it was a reminder that every plan can be replaced by another. If it seems like yesterday the organization was drooling over the young talent that helped win the 2005 Calder Cup for the Phantoms - among them Carter, Richards, goalie Antero Nittymaki, and coach John Stevens - it took a lifetime of patience for the Flyers to wait this long to dismantle the last remnants of that dream.

There have been six, now seven, regular goaltenders who followed Nittymaki or shared the role with him. All of them were the answer at some point. Stevens came and went, a nice guy unable to motivate a complacent dressing room. All the other Calder Cup teammates fell away eventually, too - Patrick Sharp, Joni Pitkanen, Dennis Seidenberg, R.J. Umberger, Ben Eager, and on and on.

In the end, Richards and Carter were just the final reminders of another plan that didn't work. The team lived with Carter's deficiencies without the puck and made Richards the captain in the hope he would grow into the job. Instead, he grew alternately combative or sullen in public, and rumors of a too-lively night life, in tandem with his friend Carter, became a burden. (For the first time in Flyers history, it should be noted, if you party too much for this organization, man, you party too much.)

Part of the rationale for the moves was clearing cap space for the goalie and Ville Leino. A large part, however, was the desire to turn the page and remove whatever walls had risen within the dressing room. Everyone knows Chris Pronger was the real captain of the team. He had everything but the "C", and now he will get that.

There is probably more to come. The trades made them much younger, and there will have to be some veteran ballast added to the roster. Either that, or it makes no sense to give a 31-year-old goalie a $51 million contract.

So, we wait for the rest from the Flyers. That is pretty much always the case with the 76ers. They aren't close to contending and might not have gotten any closer on Thursday. They did get bigger, though, and that's a decent plan right there. Vucevic is not "an above-the-rim type of player," according to general manager Ed Stefanksi. The rim isn't that far away for a 7-footer, so Vucevic might be a bit of an athletic project.

The Sixers are aching to trade Andre Iguodala, one of the ideas of the previous front office that didn't work so well, but they had to settle for nothing more dramatic than drafting Vucevic. Maybe when billionaire brainiac Joshua Harris gets the keys to the franchise, the clock will start again on real movement. Until then, you wonder if the best trading partners are finding other dates.

Still, it was a memorable day in Philadelphia sports, a day of rapid departures and arrivals. The Flyers led the way in the departures category, their specialty, but the Sixers would like to catch up with them as soon as possible. They have a few old sets of blueprints that are due to be shredded, too.