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On a Friday night in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Hershey Bears visiting the Lehigh Valley Phantoms is a premiere rivalry matchup in the American Hockey League. The PPL Center, the sparkling, 8,400-seat home of the Philadelphia Flyers' top minor-league affiliate, is jammed to capacity and there's a definite buzz in the building. The energy reaches a crescendo as the final horn sounds, with the hometown Phantoms ousting the Washington Capitals' affiliate in a hotly contested game featuring 10 goals and all sorts of rule-bending rough play that's hardly seen in the NHL anymore, yet remains the lifeblood of minor-league hockey. Although just 80 miles up the road from Philadelphia, this is a long way from the NHL. Except for what happened midway through the second period. With bruising Bears center Liam O'Brien serving a five-minute match penalty for a vicious shot to the head of an unsuspecting Phantom, Lehigh Valley's star defenseman steps on the ice. And he doesn't leave. For five straight minutes, the Phantoms' top blueliner patrols the ice, dipping and darting around penalty killers, making crisp passes and controlling the play. This "prospect" is a conductor setting an NHL-level tempo that his AHL competition struggles to keep up with. Lehigh Valley scores a power-play goal shortly thereafter to break a 3-3 tie en route to a 6-4 win. The Phantoms' top defenseman finishes with three assists, running his totals up to 18 points in 27 games. This sort of performance normally leads to a player being called up to the NHL. But this defenseman's name is Andrew MacDonald, and he's not going anywhere.  After signing a six-year, $30 million contract extension with the Flyers before last season, this 29-year-old struggled so badly in Philadelphia that general manager Ron Hextall had little choice but to send MacDonald to the AHL in October. Besides opening the door for Shayne Gostisbehere to take the NHL by storm, this move to shuttle an underachieving, big-ticket free agent to the minor leagues enabled the salary-cap-strapped Flyers to save $950,000. MacDonald still receives his full paycheck of $5 million for the season, but only $4.05 million counts against the Flyers' salary cap; it is two-and-a-half times more than his 19 teammates will make this season ... combined. While his contract remains big-league, his uniform is now minor-league. "There's a bit of shock initially," MacDonald said. "I wasn't really expecting it. But the team is dealing with cap issues. I get it." After receiving his first life-changing contract, MacDonald endured a downward spiral, transforming from a useful, high-minute defenseman with the New York Islanders to a public whipping boy in Philadelphia. Even he admitted his pay raise -- he went from making $575,000 to $5 million before the 2014-15 season -- had an impact on his fall from grace. "I think I put a little too much pressure on myself," MacDonald said. "I tried to live up to expectations and got away from what made me successful before. You get worried about making mistakes and things snowballed throughout the year. I think last year it got to a point where I was trying to do too much and got scared to do anything." In his first season with the Flyers, everything that could go wrong for MacDonald did. His point total was cut in half, his shot blocking became less frequent, his possession numbers dipped and his ice time slipped away. Although the hire of Dave Hakstol to replace Craig Berube behind the Flyers' bench initially seemed like a chance for MacDonald to have a fresh start this fall, the writing was on the wall. With Hextall insisting on a system of accountability that values playing the best players regardless of their salary, MacDonald was already behind the 8-ball heading into training camp. And with Evgeny Medvedev's emergence, Radko Gudas' return to health and Michael Del Zotto's chance to revive his career, MacDonald was deemed expendable. Out of the NHL for the first time in six years, MacDonald is at a completely different place in his life than when he last played in the AHL for the Islanders' affiliate in 2009-10. At that time, he was a plucky long-shot to make the NHL who was only drafted because of the eccentricities of Islanders owner Charles Wang. At the 2006 draft, Wang stormed his team's draft table and demanded that newly hired head coach Ted Nolan make the team's sixth-round pick, much to the dismay of Islanders scouts. Nolan didn't have a scouting background but chose MacDonald, his stud defenseman when he coached Quebec Major Junior Hockey League's Moncton Wildcats to a berth in the Memorial Cup the previous season. Having been passed over in the draft during his first two years of eligibility, MacDonald seized his fortuitous opportunity. A model AHL defenseman with the Bridgeport Sound Tigers, he cracked the Islanders' lineup for good in 2009-10 and became one of the team's top defensemen under coach Scott Gordon, who replaced Nolan in 2008. Coincidentally, Gordon is now MacDonald's AHL coach with the Phantoms. "When Andrew first got here, I think he was trying to make a perfect play every single time," Gordon said. "After the first five games or so, there was a dramatic change in his skating with the puck and making easier plays. "He's come here with the right attitude and his confidence is high right now. For me, he's worked himself back to where he was." Unfortunately for MacDonald, today's NHL is a little more complicated than better players staying in the NHL and worse players remaining in the AHL. In the salary-cap world, numbers matter, whether it's the number of defensemen on the roster or the money owed to them. And these days the Flyers don't have room for MacDonald, even if he has seemed to fix the problems that led to him being sent to the AHL. When the Flyers had injuries earlier in December, they were able to contort themselves within the salary cap just enough to fit MacDonald in for one game. When the team was healthy again, despite a worthy performance in 19:29 of ice time -- he blocked three shots, saw power-play and penalty-killing time, and was on for two goals for and two goals against while playing his former team, the Islanders, on Dec. 8 -- he was back in the AHL, where it appears he'll stay barring future injuries. "Mac's a good player," Hextall told media earlier this season. "We can't forget that. I'm convinced he's going to be back in the NHL and be a productive player at some point. "He's an NHL player, but we're in a jam here." A jam with only one way out for MacDonald, according to NBC analyst and Flyers color commentator Keith Jones. "It's going to be a big challenge. All Andrew can do is worry about the things that he can control," Jones said. "He can go down and play with the right attitude, wait for his opportunity, and in this game, with the number of injuries that we have, you never know when that opportunity is going to come. "But right now, Andrew's in no-man's land." And no-man's land is not the NHL.
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