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Holmgren raises possibility of Leighton being Bryzgalov’s backup

Michael Leighton

during the third period of their NHL hockey game, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010, in Los Angeles. The Flyers won the game 7-4. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

Mark J. Terrill

The Philadelphia Flyers got a decent haul of draft picks when they traded Sergei Bobrovsky to Columbus. Still, it did leave them without a clear understudy for Ilya Bryzgalov and while there will certainly be appealing candidates on the free agent market, Philadelphia is somewhat limited by its poor cap situation.

They need someone relatively cheap and Flyers GM Paul Holmgren apparently already has someone in mind.

“We talked about Michael Leighton, who is still really our guy,” Holmgren said, according to Frank Seravalli of the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer. “Ilya plays a lot of games and we’re counting on him playing a lot of games next year. We’ll do our work and come up with a good guy.”

Leighton did have one good run with the Philadelphia Flyers back in 2009-10, which convinced them to sign him to a two-year contract worth $3.1 million. Over the course of that deal, he spent almost all of his time in the minors and ended up playing in just one NHL game. Seravalli claims that Leighton “made no friends inside the organization.”

Leighton is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent this summer and is likely to take a significant pay cut.

It’s worth noting that he did put up good numbers in the AHL, so maybe he’s still capable of being a decent backup under a goaltender that’s capable of making 65-plus starts. That being said, Leighton sounds more like a fallback option that the Flyers should only consider for the number two gig if things don’t go their way in the first week of July.