Anybody remember Nolan Patrick? It feels like a fever dream that the Philadelphia Flyers won the second overall pick in the 2017 draft lottery from their original 13th overall spot and took consensus first overall pick, whom the Devils passed on, forward Nolan Patrick with the selection. He’d play just 197 games over the following four seasons with the Flyers, before eventually trading him to Nashville for Ryan Ellis, an entirely separate hallucination.
It was ultimately a migraine disorder that derailed the career of Nolan Patrick, but he wasn’t exactly taking the league by storm during his first few seasons like expected for a typical top draft pick. He posted 30 points in 73 games during his rookie season in 2017-18 and 31 points in 72 games during his sophomore campaign. The beginnings of the medical problems sidelined him for the entirety of the 2019-20 season.
He returned in 2021-22 for 52 of the Flyers’ 56 games, primarily in a bottom-six role, scoring just four goals and nine points with a team-worst -30 rating before being shipped to the Predators during the offseason.
It was a short, disaster-filled tenure for a player that was supposed to change the direction of the franchise. An unlucky roll of the dice at best, or horrible miscalculation from the front office at worst. But the ripple effects from Patrick’s underwhelming performances are still felt today.
Ron Hextall, who was the GM at the time of the Patrick selection, and the Flyers put all their eggs in Patrick immediately after drafting him. They traded Brayden Schenn to St. Louis later the same day for a pair of first round picks (and Jori Lehtera) and used the 2017 selection on Morgan Frost, another center.
With the Addition of Patrick, who was going to make the NHL out of the gate and Frost projected to be ready sooner rather than later, they ditched Schenn, who was already struggling to carve out a spot on the roster for quite some time.
There were always two sides to the coin of the Schenn trade– Hextall managed to get two first round picks in return, a hell of a deal for a player for a player who had eclipsed 50 points in just two of his six NHL seasons. Yet, the collective trio of Patrick, Frost and Joel Farabee, whom they’d use the second first round pick on in 2018, have collectively never accumulated to the value Schenn brought on ice.
Brayden Schenn went on to be a key piece of St. Louis’ Cup win in 2019 and because a perennial 20+ goal player who hovered around either side of 60 points. A mark that neither Patrick or Frost (or Farabee, for that matter) has hit even once.
That brings us to the 2019 offseason. Chuck Fletcher’s first at the helm and they ended up signing Kevin Hayes to a seven-year contract to serve as the team’s second line center. Now, at this time the public details to Patrick’s whereabouts were murky at best. It wasn’t until much later that it was revealed he was dealing with a migraine disorder and his return was in question.
It’s unclear what the front office knew about the state of Patrick’s career at that point, but even if the medical diagnosis wasn’t 100% known, Patrick’s previously underwhelming seasons weren’t enough to convince Fletcher he was capable of being a key piece of a team that was, at the time, gearing up for a competitive era.
Patrick returned in 2020 as a disinterested, moody, depth forward who got moved to the wing and had practically zero potential at the NHL level. He was used sparingly on both the powerplay and penalty kill and averaged just over 13 minutes of ice time which was among the lowest of the regular roster players. It didn’t help that the Flyers as a whole were in a tailspin en route to one of their worst seasons of all time, but Patrick did nothing to contribute to a turnaround.
He was traded to Nashville during the 2021 offseason along with fellow struggling prospect Phil Myers in exchange for Ryan Ellis, mercifully ending the catastrophe that was Nolan Patrick’s run with the Philadelphia Flyers.
Patrick being a bust stings. The fact that Miro Heiskanen, Cale Makar, and Elias Pettersson were drafted in the three picks after is just the icing on the cake and the typical misfortune the Flyers are cursed with these days.
The Devils passed on him for a reason, and there’s been some damning behind the scenes scouting reports that have emerged in the years since that indicated that the team may have been well aware of the questions surrounding his will to play the game at a high level. Obviously they can’t predict injury problems, but the off-ice baggage Patrick carried was documented well enough that there was a shred of doubt as to whether or not they should’ve taken him.
If the Flyers could re-do it, maybe it’s best to draft Patrick, thank their lucky stars, and just keep Schenn for the immediate future to make sure Patrick could transition to the NHL before throwing him in the deep end and shipping his life preserver to Missouri. Schenn’s contract ran until the 2020 offseason, which means they probably also wouldn’t have signed Kevin Hayes, and considering Danny Briere retained nearly $3.6 million for three years in exchange for a sixth round pick to move the guy during the 2023 offseason, that’d be a welcome plus right about now.
Nolan Patrick should’ve been that franchise-altering piece the Flyers needed. The luck that came with the lottery win and the icing on the cake of a (at the time) three year rebuild. Even if he wasn’t a bonafide number one center, had he stayed healthy and carved out a role as a long-term middle six center to at least replace Schenn could’ve made all the difference and rewritten the last few seasons of Flyers’ history. And who wouldn’t want to alter the course of the path the Flyers ultimately went down right about now?
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: nhl.com
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