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Opportunity knocks for Coburn

by JERRY DEL COLLIANO, Inside Hockey

Updated: May 11, 2008, 2:00 AM EST 11 comments

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You hear that knocking, kid? It's not the "knock-knock-knocks" that knock around in your engine like the old gasoline commercial talked about. It's the opportunity to become a superstar.

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And the knocking couldn't get much louder as the Flyers head into Game 2 against the Penguins and all of their much ballyhooed star power — the kind of star power the NHL wants to see get to the Stanley Cup Finals — unless you do something about it. Knock, knock, knock.

The Flyers' brass knew pretty quickly that they really got one over on Atlanta last March as they pulled off one of the most lopsided trades in NHL in the last ten years when they traded Alexi Zhitnik for Braydon Coburn, Atlanta's hulking young, puck-moving defenseman.

Zhitnik took Atlanta nowhere, and he pretty much faded into irrelevance this season (eight points and a minus-eight rating) after a pretty strong campaign the year before with Long Island, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

Coburn, on the other hand, has blossomed into one of the brightest young stars on the blue line in the entire NHL. Coburn's numbers include nine defensive goals, a solid 36 points and a whopping plus-17 rating on a Flyers team that one year ago was the league's doormat. To top it all off, Coburn is only 23 years old.

But everything changed for Coburn when veteran defenseman Kimmo Timonen found out he would be out indefinitely because of a blood clot in his leg. The Flyers, facing the NHL's best one-two punch up the middle in Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, basically will turn the reigns of their defense and their power play over to an unproven youngster — a player they only signed for two years because they wanted to see how he developed.

Braydon, wanna make $7 million a year really fast? Find a way to carry the team like an A-list defenseman should If you do and Flyers move on, you are going to get paid like a rock star. The opportunity is yours, it's time to step up.

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