The Philadelphia Flyers entered the 2023-24 season with a new front office in place, but a roster that shared far more similarities to last years than originally anticipated. They made some questionable decisions during the 2023 offseason when they decided to keep veterans like Travis Konecny and Scott Laughton on the roster despite the idea of a “rebuild” and some rumored large returns for both players. There’s also the returning Sean Couturier, who seems to be in better condition than you’d expect from someone who missed nearly two full years with back injuries.
While they play big roles in the current construction of the organization both on and off the ice, keeping the veterans around indicates they feel they could win with them.
Sean Couturier will turn 31 in December, Cam Atkinson is 34, Travis Konecny and Travis Sanheim will turn 27 and 28 respectively in the spring, and Scott Laughton turns 30 shortly after the conclusion of the 2023-24 season.
Couturier has six seasons left on his contract, Both Konecny and Atkinson have one, Laughton has two and Sanheim has the longest sentence with seven more years. That’s an aging core who are close to exiting the primes of their careers, if it hasn’t happened already.
John Tortorella has talked about the importance of leadership on the roster, especially when the youth gets injected. And there is validity to that line of thinking. There are teams who have torn down too far during a rebuild and struggled to re-establish themselves when they’ve got a few prospects in place. Notably the Sabres, Coyotes and the Oilers for much of the last 15 years have gone out of their way to tank and it, in turn, takes a Herculean effort to not only develop their players properly, but to properly enter “go time” when the light was at the end of their rebuilding tunnel.
If you rewind back to the early days of the Ron Hextall era, he made the call to not trade away guys like Claude Giroux, Jake Voracek and Wayne Simmonds, who were all in their primes because he though he could rebuild with young guys and still win with the veterans. It ended up not working because the young guys never panned out and they waited way too long for those negative results. One by one they aged out of their prime and were shipped out of town for pennies on the dollar compared to their values just a few years previous.
It’s the biggest fault of the organization on the whole over the last decade-plus- their inability to ever take a step forward. Hextall sat in neutral for years and Chuck Fletcher never committed hard enough to winning despite his “aggressive retool” mentality. It’s going to be arguably the biggest question in the short and long term for Briere- can he actually build up the Flyers to a competitive state?
If they’re going to keep this veteran core together, do they intend to win with them or are they just here to ride out their careers as the grizzled leaders on the team with no greater purpose? Then deal them for a fraction of their value when their heyday has passed? Some of the rumors around both Laughton and Konecny during the 2023 offseason indicated they could’ve sold them for a king’s ransom, but they held firm and ran it back for another season. Is there a method to that madness or is it just Tortorella over-asserting himself to keep his favorites despite it being an active negative for the “rebuild” as a whole?
Keeping Scott Laughton, the de facto captain despite not wearing a “C” is fine. Adding one rando on the backend like Marc Staal is fine. But the vet-to-youth ratio is way out of whack. Only four prospects -Egor Zamula, Bobby Brink, Tyson Foerster and Emil Andrae- made the opening night roster, and most nights, only two are actually playing. So while the abundance of veterans on the roster may be building a better culture, they’re also boxing out some of the youth due to the sheer quantity of veterans on the roster.
Both Danny Briere and Tortorella have spent training camp, preseason and the early days of the regular season walking a verbal tightrope, staying non-comital to playing the vets and talking about injecting the youth, but their words have not necessarily played out on the ice just yet. The idea is by season’s end the kids have overthrown the veterans for ice time, and in some cases that may be true, but will the Flyers actually move on from the vets at the trade deadline or offseason even if the kids appear to be firmly in place at the NHL level?
They can keep Laughton as a leader, but if they kept Konecny because he’s a good player… what purpose does that serve the organization if they don’t actually intend on utilizing him to the fullest to actually win?
If Foerster and Brink spend the entire season in the NHL do they consider moving Konecny during the summer? Or do they keep everyone and just make the uncomfortable squeeze on the wings work in an attempt to eke out a few extra victories on the season; not enough to propel them into a deep postseason run, but just enough to torpedo their draft positioning.
If the Flyers don’t intend to turn up the heat until Matvei Michkov shows up in 2026 and the expected few years of growing pains after that, most of the vets will be in their mid-to-late 30’s and a few will need new contracts. Does holding on to Scott Laughton with another five-year contract in tow make sense? Or are they better off losing some of the mediocre vets lacing the roster and consider real upgrades to make sure their in-house prospects meet their potential and Michkov will have actual talent to play with upon his arrival?
There are quite a few questions facing the Flyers and their approach to the trade deadline in March and the 2024 offseason. With any luck, over the coming months they’ll evaluate where the kids stand and if they deem them worthy NHLers that will make the idea of a transition much easier when it’s time to trade some of the lingering vets. Though after a summer where they not only refused to sell, but doubled down and added more “leadership” it’s a classic Flyers trap of saying one thing but doing another. Will this finally be the year the tide turns in Philly or is the power couple of Briere and Tortorella just too much for the rookies to overcome?
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: Getty Images
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