Transaction Analysis: Flyers Roll the Dice on Bellows

As a team in search of goal-scoring sources, the Philadelphia Flyers seemed to be one of the main candidates to claim Kieffer Bellows as soon as the news broke that the New York Islanders had put their 2016 first-round pick on waivers on Wednesday. Regardless of which club claimed him, New York likely suspected that they would not be able to get the 24-year-old left winger through waivers and assign him to the AHL's Bridgeport Islanders.

Unsurprisingly, the Flyers made the claim. Bellows will practice with his new team at the Flyers Training Center in Voorhees on Friday. He is likely to be in the starting lineup come Saturday when Philly hosts the Carolina Hurricanes on Saturday.
The Flyers are short on forwards right now. Sean Couturier suffered a second setback in his recovery from back surgery, and his rehab skating regimen has been halted. Cam Atkinson has had a frustrating lack of progress in what was initially believed to be a day-to-day upper-body injury. According to Flyers head coach John Tortorella, the issue presented suddenly and has not improved to a sufficient degree to allow the player to return to the ice.
The bottom line, according to Tortorella, is that neither veteran player is likely to be in game action any time soon. The team did get Owen TIppett back in the lineup on Sunday after he missed five games with an upper-body injury widely suspected to have been a concussion. Tanner Laczynski missed Thursday's game to be with his wife, Madison, as the couple awaited the birth of their first child.
What are the Flyers getting in Bellows? The player, who was selected by the Islanders with the 19th overall pick of the 2016 NHL Entry Draft, has one truly outstanding asset: his shooting ability.
Bellows boasts a bazooka of a one-timer. When he can find a seam where he can get open to launch a rocket on net, he can simply overpower goaltenders. His father, longtime NHL sniper Brian Bellows, also owned a devastating finishing touch that enabled him to top the 40-goal mark four times (with a high of 55 goals) and to score 30 goals or more in eight different seasons.
Strictly in terms of pure shooting ability, Kieffer is comparable to his father. He's also got a little more physicality to his game than the elder Bellows. It's the rest of Kieffer Bellows' game that has yet to develop as hoped.
The still-young player has frustrated his coaches at the pro level so far, including Barry Trotz and Lane Lambert. The latter dressed Bellows only once this season prior to the player being placed on waivers.
Consistency has been elusive for Bellows at both the AHL and NHL levels. He is not blessed with more than average skating ability so he has to anticipate better in order to find the lanes in the attack zone. He's a good puckhandler but he's much more of a natural finisher than a playmaking type.
Bellows' defensive game gets a bad rap but it's something that's been a work in progress ever since he turned pro and in which he made some progress while playing for Trotz in New York. He'll never be a Selke Trophy candidate but he doesn't need to be so long as he produces goals.
Bellows did make strides a season ago during Trotz's final season with the Islanders. He dressed in 45 games -- a career-high to date -- and chipped in six goals and 19 points while averaging 11:52 of ice time per game. He showed a shooter's mentality and fired 79 shots on the net. Although he posted a pedestrian 7.6 percent shooting percentage in terms of converting shots on net into goals, he's eminently capable of being a double-digit percentage shooter.
With Bellows, it's all about finding some consistency. Sniper types tend to be streaky by nature but Bellows has been excessively so. Last season, he closed strong with points in six of the final nine games (2g, 4a) and saw his ice time increase a bit. Previously, he had a post-All Star break stretch with four points in six games (1g, 3a) and a four-game, five-point (2g, 3a) shortly before and after the leaguewide Christmas break. There were droughts in between these stretches where a good moment here and a good play there were resulting in goals for his team.
Can Bellows make an impact in Philadelphia? In boxing, it'd be called a "puncher's chance". He needs to play on a line where he works to get to the shooting areas, someone can get him the puck and the line's other member can do the dirty work to win battles on the forecheck. He will also need to play to a sufficient level in his 200-foot-game to stay within the structure that John Tortorella demands.along with an aggressive approach.
Which winger would the left-handed Bellows replace in the Flyers' lineup? That remains to be seen. The Flyers would like to see the right-handed Wade Allison, who scored the season's first goal on opening night and has not posted a point since despite some scoring opportunities, return to the level of play he showed during his NHL trial in 2020-21. Even if not scoring, however, Allison shows grit and physicality in the trenches. TIppett, who is also a right-handed shooter, seems safe in his lineup spot. Laczynski, who has mostly been confined to a fourth-line right wing (or center on opening night) role apart from portions of the first three games, may be the player who comes out.
Those things will play themselves out in the weeks and months to come. For now, Bellows could slot somewhere in the top nine and 5-on-5 and be assigned a second power play unit role.