Bobby Clarke

OTTAWA - It's going to be a whirlwind few days for Flyers center Claude Giroux. Giroux, playing in front of family and old friends, scored a goal in Sunday's All-Star Game in Ottawa, which is near where he spent his high school years. On Monday, he will be honored by the Philadelphia Sportswriters Association for being named the city's athlete of the year. It is an award that has been won by such Philadelphia icons as Wilt Chamberlain, Joe Frazier, Mike Schmidt, Bobby Clarke and Steve Van Buren.

The Flyers went into the wee hours before today's entry draft trying to put together a deal with Detroit for goaltender Mark LaForest. They would give up the first of their two No. 2 picks (30th overall) for the 24-year-old LaForest, who played all but five of his games last year with the Red Wings' Adirondack (N.Y.) farm club. He was 23-8-3 with the American League team and recorded a 2.83 goals against average. General manager Bobby Clarke, wanting to strengthen Hershey in goal, made an attempt to get LaForest at the trading deadline.

THE DAY WAS May 9, 1974. Bobby Clarke had just scored two goals against the Boston Bruins in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals, including the game-winner in overtime. The Flyers had not won a game in Boston in 7 years and 19 attempts, and that moment is widely viewed as the turning point of a series that brought the Flyers their first Cup. That day, his coach, Fred Shero, said, "You know, Clarke is the best player in the league, not just from me . . . [The Russians think] Clarke, he's the best we have over here.

Fate has proven to have a sense of humor. It has delivered Glenn Resch to the Flyers' door. "The way everything fell into place at the last minute, it was almost like it was meant to be," Resch said yesterday. "That's why I'm so excited about it. It's such a positive situation. It's just right for both of us. " This was almost entirely a recent thought, however, one that was fueled by the rumors that began almost before Pelle Lindbergh was laid to rest. Certainly it had not occurred to Resch, who was traded to Philadelphia from New Jersey yesterday for a third-round 1986 draft choice, during any of the 43 games over 12 years in which he had battled the Flyers to a fitting 19-19-5 standstill.

Under the most perfect of circumstances, Bobby Clarke could have waited and waited and waited until the Los Angeles Kings wanted Doug Crossman so badly from the Flyers that they would have thrown Wayne Gretzky into the deal. Instead, the Flyers yesterday settled for veteran defenseman Jay Wells in the same one-for-one deal that the Kings had been trying to make since last February. The Flyers' and Crossman's mutual distrust notwithstanding, the guy can play defense better than three-quarters of the defensemen in the NHL. And he proved it, both as a member of Team Canada and in being a key to two Flyers marches to the Stanley Cup finals.

The team player is in the office at the top of the stairs once again, sitting behind the desk in a room made heavy by dark wood and expectation. From the windows along a side wall, there is the half-light of the empty hockey rink, its clean ice waiting for the team to practice. "I've moved enough," Bobby Clarke says with a smile. "This is home. " Clarke - president, general manager and last great hope of the Philadelphia Flyers - keeps the outside world beyond the door of his office.

OK, so Phillies fans have had to endure a long, tough summer, one in which their expectations turned out to be as inflated as the bullpen ERA. The sellout streak ended. So too, almost certainly, will the postseason streak. Two of the team's aces - Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay - never got going. And on a few now notorious occasions, neither did Jimmy Rollins, who gave new meaning to baseball's "dog" days. There was little relief from the misery. Nothing but misery from the relief corps.

Flyers goalie Roman Cechmanek insisted there was no way he would be chosen for the Feb. 4 NHL All-Star Game in Denver. "No, no, maybe next year," Cechmanek told a reporter after yesterday's practice. A few hours later, the league confirmed that its selection committee had tapped Cechmanek to join San Jose's Evgeni Nabokov in backing up World team starter Dominik Hasek, of Buffalo. Finally, Cechmanek had to admit what most people around the Flyers had assumed over the past few days - that he was Denver-bound.

Bill Barber's Stanley Cup championship rings and plaque in the Hockey Hall of Fame got his old linemate Bobby Clarke off the hook with Flyers fans. After an embarrassing 5-1 Flyers loss in Detroit on Friday night, Clarke reluctantly decided that Craig Ramsay had to go. Yesterday he elevated Barber - his linemate on the Broad Street Bullies in the 1970s - to head coach. The move, Clarke's fifth coaching change since inheriting Terry Simpson from Russ Farwell in 1994, might have smacked of panic.

Bob Clarke paused in the middle of explaining his view of yet another dicey, potentially ugly situation erupting around the Flyers as they begin the Stanley Cup playoffs. Clarke looked at the reporters sitting in front of his desk and shook his head. "Nothing's ever easy around here, is it?" he asked. No, indeed. Here is the latest Flyers soap opera, stripped to essentials: Coach Roger Neilson, recovering from a stem-cell transplant to combat bone-marrow cancer, and bronzed from a 10-day visit to Clarke's condo in Sarasota, Fla., thinks he is ready to take charge again from interim coach Craig Ramsay.