Believe it or not, the Hockey Gods did not look down fondly on the Philadelphia Flyers during the 2023 draft lottery. They stayed at the seventh overall slot, failing to luck into Connor Bedard with their %6.5 chance at the first overall selection.
Above all else, Bedard was a beacon of hope for the Flyers. A team that has been starved of talent for many years and is lacking a truly notable star in the pipeline. A light at the end of the tunnel of misery the team has been dwelling in for way too long gets snuffed out. It takes the wind out of the sails of a fanbase that was hoping that this would be the year the bad luck the Flyers have been enraptured in would finally come to an end.
Plus, Danny Briere and the organization have already declared a rebuild, theoretically meaning that the team will not make any notable outside additions during the 2023 offseason, and drafting at seventh overall means a project rather than a sure thing. It essentially means the 2023-24 season can already be labeled a complete waste of time.
Running it back with a near identical roster with minuscule milestones like Frost hitting 40 points or Tippett scoring 27 goals are just going to have to suffice for another year. Moral victories instead of actual ones.
According to tankathon.com, the Flyers are expected to draft Oliver Moore at seventh overall. He’s an American player part of the US Development Program who’s committed to the University of Minnesota next season. It means neither of the Flyers’ top prospects would be at the professional level until at least 2024-25 with Cutter Gauthier returning to Boston College. It means their potential at the AHL or NHL level will remain unknown, making it difficult to get excited about any flashes of brilliance they may show in the NCAA.
On the bright side, the Flyers didn’t fall back a slot or two, something that seemed so painfully comical that it felt like a sure thing, and Bedard isn’t coming to the metro division as the Blue Jackets got shafted from second to third overall.
Needless to say, the pressure gets turned up quite a bit on interim GM Danny Briere, who won’t be getting an easy way out of his first summer at the helm. With any luck, he’ll have a trick or two up his sleeve to give the fans literally any reason to care about the 2023-24 season, but given his inexperience and lack of leverage when it comes to just about any negotiation, something tells me that we haven’t seen the last of the suffering the Flyers will be dishing out.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: bardown.com
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