Amonte suffers MCL tear, out two weeks

Truthfully, I don’t know how I should feel about this. Tony Amonte has been a goal scorer his whole career, with 385 goals in 984 games. Since coming to the Flyers, however, his production has slipped with only 20 goals in 64 games. This can be attributed to two things: age and playing for Ken Hitchcock. Amonte, who will be 34 in August, has always built his game around speed. He is not a John LeClair-type player, who will bully a defenseman off the puck, then carry that defenseman to the front of the net with him to jam the puck past the goalie. No, Amonte instead will use his blinding speed to zip through the neutral zone, fly past the defenseman at the blueline and then rip a wicked wrist shot high over the goalie’s glove hand. While Amonte is no Todd Fedoruk, he has definitely lost a step or two in recent years and will never get them back. Playing in a defensive-oriented system will take numbers away from any player. Ken Hitchcock has preached defense first from Day One, so no one should be surprised to see Amonte’s numbers fall. One wonders if Hitchcock would let his myriad of offensive weapons -- namely Amonte, Jeremy Roenick, Mark Recchi, LeClair, Simon Gagne, Kim Johnsson, Joni Pitkanen, Mike Comrie, and Sami Kapanen -- loose, what would happen. So, I don’t know if I should be worried about Amonte’s injury or not. Hitchcock’s system basically uses players as interchangeable parts, which helped justify the trading of Justin Williams. Thus, I’m inclined to believe that the injury will not hurt the Flyers all that much. On the other hand, Hitchcock is a firm believer in the “veteran influence” and this will be missing from the lineup without Amonte. (Side note: Hitchcock is already talking about replacing outstanding rookie Pitkanen for the playoffs, a move he made last year with defenseman Dennis Seidenberg. In my estimation, Seidenberg didn’t recover from the slight and may never live up to his potential, especially after his recent gruesome injury.) I guess -- as usual when it comes to the Flyers -- I’m left sitting here scratching my head. Update: I should have included this earlier, but for some reason I didn't. Well, that's obviously my fault and I apologize. As I should have pointed out earlier, the Daily News beat writer for the Flyers, Ed Moran, filed a lazy story about Amonte's injury today that didn't bother with gauging anyone's reaction to the news. The Inquirer's Tim Panaccio does a much more thorough job of covering the story by getting quotes from Hitchcock, Roenick and team captain Keith Primeau, along with passing along the information that the Flyers called up forward Kirby Law to fill Amonte's roster spot.