Report: The Flyers have exercised one of their buyouts.

The Philadelphia Flyers have decided that they no longer want veteran defenseman David Schlemko on their roster.

On Friday the Flyers organization officially announced that it had parted ways with Schlemko when they made the move to place him on unconditional waivers for the purpose of buying out his NHL contract. The move comes as somewhat of a surprise I suppose if only due to the fact that Schlemko had just a single year remaining on his contract and had a relatively manageable cap hit of $2.1 million for the upcoming 2019 - 2020 NHL regular season.

That being said Schlemko was never utilized even a single time at the NHL level by the Flyers organization after he was acquired as part of the trade that sent veteran Dale Weise back to the Montreal Canadiens. When you consider that he Flyers were paying him big bucks to effectively played down in the American Hockey League with their affiliate the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, it does make some sense to shed as much of his salary as possible assuming there was no one else on the roster worthy of a buyout. 

The Flyers will still have Schlemko's contract to deal with to some degree however as his cap hit for this upcoming season will drop all the way down to $900,000 and the following year will see him count against the Flyers cap for $700,000. The move now leaves general manager Chuck Fletcher with just over $16 million in cap space to work with for the upcoming free agent period, although how much he can flex that will likely depend on the decisions he makes with his pending restricted free agents. Nonetheless I expect that Fletcher would not have made this move if he did not have plans for the money, so it should be a very interesting next few days for the Flyers organization.