Ed Moran: Flyers must make Band-Aid move for defense

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Randy

Jones

is worse than the Flyers expected: He will be out 12 to 16 weeks recovering from what could only be called significant surgery. He has a labrum tear, torn cartilage and torn ligaments, all in his right hip, and a groin pull.

Jones is going to Nashville this week to have it all repaired. I don't know how this team will be able to move forward without trading for a veteran defenseman, considering it also has lost Ryan Parent to shoulder surgery.

General manager Paul Holmgren is not a guy to stand around and wait for things to get bad before he makes a move. He acknowledged after Saturday's 4-3, Opening-Night loss to the Rangers that he was looking, but it will take some work to get anything done.

The Flyers don't have the salary-cap room right now and they are up against the allowed number of 50 contracts. Holmgren would have to make moves to make room.

"It won't be easy," Holmgren said. "But we'll continue looking around. I expect something to happen.

"When you lose two guys you considered in your mix even before you lose a game, it certainly makes you a little nervous, but we will evaluate things as we go along and see if anything pops up. We certainly believe we have good depth, obviously it's not as good as it was a few days ago."

I expect something to happen.

Luca Sbisa is 18 years old. It would be one thing to keep such a young player in the NHL as a seventh defenseman who could be subbed in and out. It would be even more of an assignment to make him a six. But on a team that is now starting Lasse Kukkonen, Sbisa is the fifth guy on the blue line.

Kukkonen doesn't have a ton of experience, and the Flyers, just by the fact that he was a healthy scratch so many times last season, have not expressed an abundance of confidence in him. He wasn't the reason the Flyers fell behind 4-0 in the first period Saturday night - Marty Biron was having an Opening Night he won't soon forget - but he did not play well.

The defense as a whole didn't. All of the pairings were new because of the injuries to Jones and Parent, who will have surgery Thursday.

Sbisa is an impressive kid. He took a while to catch up to the pace in his first NHL game, but once he did he was fun to watch.

But he's a kid. Period. They need some experience now.

It was certainly an interesting night at the Wachovia Center with Republican vice presidential candidate

Sarah Palin

dropping the opening puck. It's not often that a guest is driven inside the building, up the ramp on the loading dock and into the hallway on the event level.

And then the Flyers went flat on their faces in the first period.

But let's look at the good points:

Antero Niittymaki was not supposed to be available for the start of the season when camp opened after having hip surgery. But he came back quicker than expected, and was not only on the bench, he came in for Biron after the fourth goal was scored and was tremendous, stopping all 13 shots he faced.

And then there was the new line of Mike Richards, Simon Gagne and Danny Briere. That line has speed, skill and grit and seems to have something else - chemistry.

It's early, but that line scored two of the Flyers' three goals. Gagne and Richards both scored and Briere finished with two assists while finding Richards on the move and in dangerous places.

The Flyers fought back when the game should have been a rollover and, loss aside, it was a pretty good game to watch after that dreadful first period.

The league wanted teams that could compete with each other on any given night, and that's what they have. Just look at some of the first few games:

Toronto beat defending Stanley Cup champion Detroit and then lost big to Montreal. Pittsburgh, last year's runner-up, lost to New Jersey in overtime, Nashville beat Dallas, injury-plagued Carolina topped newly stocked Tampa Bay in overtime, Washington lost to Atlanta on Friday night and then beat Chicago on Saturday.

The injury update was not all bad news yesterday.

Steve Downie

will be in the lineup when the Flyers take on the Canadiens in the Wachovia Center tonight. Downie is wearing a brace for extra support while he continues to recover from an MCL strain in his right knee. *

Send e-mail to morane@phillynews.com