The 2023 NHL draft has come and gone, and despite a few week’s worth of spicy trade rumors, the Flyers walked away with very little to show for it.
They were able to move Ivan Provorov in a smart three-team deal (with the benefit of hindsight, there’s a good chance Jarmo Kekäläinen and Rob Blake carried those negotiations). They got the worst possible outcome when they dealt Hayes to St. Louis, retaining half of his $7.1 million cap hit in exchange for a sixth round pick, and by all accounts, there’s a similar retention-for-nothing trade brewing with Tony DeAngelo that will happen next week.
That means everyone else, including their best trade chips like Travis Konecny, Carter Hart and Scott Laughton are all more than likely coming back next season. The Flyers also failed to move Travis Sanheim before his new contract and no-trade clause kicks in on July 1.
Failing and/or refusing to sell is a rather large hiccup for a team supposedly embarking on a rebuild.
If a true rebuilding squad like Chicago or Arizona had players like Konecny and Laughton who posted career-years individually, they’d be overjoyed to sell those pieces where their value was at its peak. The Flyers don’t seem eager to do the same thing.
If the idea is waiting until the trade deadline and trying again, well that may straight up backfire. Konecny has had some very streaky runs in his career, and while he had a personal best 31 goals and 61 points in 60 games in 2022-23, it’s by far the outlier of his career. What happens if he regresses to a 20-goal, sub-50-point player again? Scott Laughton’s 11 years into his career, what are the odds he can top 40 points again, a mark he’s never come close to before? And that’s not even taking potential injuries during the season into consideration that could decimate their value or make them unavailable at the deadline in the first place.
Not only are players like Laughton, Konecny and Sanheim still here, but Sean Couturier and Cam Atkinson are expected to return next season too. That virtually guarantees the young players who could realistically make the jump to the NHL full-time next season get their legs cut out from under them.
Tyson Foerster, Bobby Brink, Elliot Desnoyers, Olle Lycksell, Sam Ersson, Egor Zamula and Ronnie Attard highlight the AHL level players who could’ve reasonably competed for a main roster spot, but it’s unlikely there’s any to go around now, especially at forward.
There are 11 forwards expected under contract as of right now (this was written a day before free agency where that could change for the worse) and if DeAngelo gets dealt to Carolina, that’s five defenseman already accounted for. Starting off a rebuild by making sure very few of the players, if any at all, get consistent NHL time to develop.
Chances are, they deploy a similar tactic that they tried last year when it comes to divvying up ice time- Everyone is going to get very minor sample sizes of NHL action at some point, but nobody is going to stick long term. Zamula played 14 games, Ersson 12, Foerster 8, Lycksell 8, Desnoyers 4, Attard 2, and Ginning played one game in 2022-23.
That’s just not good enough. Especially when there’s no good reason for it to happen again in 2023-24. It’s not like the Flyers have a star-studded, playoff-caliber roster that they just can’t conceivably break up in favor of a rebuild. They’ve been a bottom 10 team for years now that should’ve been eager to integrate the youth based on the pure definition of a rebuild.
There’s a feel-good feeling around the franchise because they were able to snag Matvei Michkov at seventh overall, and the rest of the draft received generally positive reviews, but the inactivity on the main roster ultimately set them up for the in-house rebuilding efforts in the here and now to be completely stalled.
Is this starting to sound familiar? A strong draft that everyone will overvalue in the short-term, but the organization drops the ball when it’s time to actually continue the development pattern by advancing them through the professional ranks, instead falling back to a sub-optimal roster that gets more or less run back and didn’t get turned over properly to give the kids room to grow in the first place. This is Ron Hextall 101.
Maybe as the fall rolls around a few unexpected make the team out of camp, but given the current roster construction, it appears to be another season that boils down to nothing more than a complete waste of time with very little forward progress will be made.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: TSN.com
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