The Philadelphia Flyers have a new problem the franchise is relatively unfamiliar with- too much goaltending talent. 25-year-old Carter Hart is in his sixth NHL season and has had a renaissance during the 2023-24 campaign. Despite his career turning in the right direction and arguably not yet his peak, he could be on the trade block during the 2024 offseason, which both the Flyers have hinted at and the sections of the fanbase seems to support. But is it really a good idea for the Flyers to trade their starting goalie?
Keep
Carter Hart is 25 years old, will give the team a chance to win pretty much every night and when he’s at his peak is arguably a top ten goalie in the league. That alone should be a pretty good reason for keeping him.
The biggest reason many are ready to winning to move Hart is the goalie depth within the organization. Sam Ersson, who has just 29 NHL games under his belt as of this writing with a career 2.72 goals against average and .902 save percentage being the initial replacement and prospects Alexei Kolosov, who is expected to make the North American jump next season, followed by Carson Bjarnason, whom the Flyers selected in the second round of the 2023 draft filling in the holes in the coming years.
The theoretical depth in the pipeline is great. Always be drafting goalies, after all. But it is just theoretical. Sam Ersson is the only one that has proven there is NHL potential, coming in a very small sample size. It’s far too early to pencil in either Kolosov or Bjarnason into the long term picture at the NHL level, plus there’s practically no way Felix Sandstrom returns to the team this summer, which means that Ersson and Cal Petersen would be the NHL duo, a huge downgrade from Hart/Ersson. Having a 24 and 25 year old as your 1A and 1B should be celebrated and maintained for the foreseeable future, not broken up as quickly as possible.
Trade
Rumors emerged during the 2023 offseason that the Flyers were shopping Hart. The reason was never really given, and nothing ultimately became of the rumors, but it was assumed the Team Canada investigation had something to do with it. Considering we’re seemingly no closer to an outcome of the case by the time the 2024 offseason officially starts, that cloud is still going to follow Hart into the negotiations, and maybe why Danny Briere would once again consider shopping his rights.
As far as value goes, it’s hard to put a price tag on Hart when it comes to a trade. Whoever acquires him would be just adding his RFA rights (unless a sign and trade occurs, which isn’t an overly common occurrence in hockey) so that’s already starting from a point of weakness for Briere, and if the Flyers are moving their star goalie because of potential legal troubles tied back to the unresolved Team Canada case, it may hard to convince teams to pay a premium for taking the risk of adding him.
Conclusion
The NHL has been going towards a two goalie system for years now. Typically, there’s less than a handful of players every season that make it to 60 games played, and less than 20 goalies a season of the 100 or so that will play an NHL game will play 50 or more games. So for the Flyers to have Carter Hart, who is posting top 10 stats and Sam Ersson who, albeit being a bit streaky, seems to have starting-caliber potential is not a bad thing.
At some point, they’re going to have to deal with their tandem, as every team with a bonafide star starting and rising star backup does. That may come in a couple years from now when Ersson’s contract expires in the 2026 offseason, but for now, the Flyers can’t have too much of a good thing and should be in no hurry to voluntarily move on from Hart.
“Voluntarily” is the key word after all. With the Team Canada investigation still lingering in the background, with no set in stone meaning of what a charge would actually mean for Hart and his status with the team -or whether or not names are ever released at all- are very much out of the Flyers’ control. But preemptively moving him and his name coming back innocent or never actually being officially accused at all is not the big brain move you want the Flyers’ front office to be making.
Flyers president Keith Jones told Sportsnet in December that he’d “be surprised” if Hart wasn’t the long term starter for the Flyers, but that also goes against his on-the-record theory of teams don’t need to pay their goalies a ton of money to be successful. Despite the fact that he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth, it’s ultimately Briere’s call whether or not they pay Hart, not Jones’.
Trading Hart feels so outwardly stupid that there’s no way the organization would do it. It’s a move that could backfire so spectacularly in the face of the new front office regime that taking the risk in the first place seems so unnecessarily dumb. But the emergence of Sam Ersson and last summer’s rumors regarding Hart opens the chance they actually considering moving him. Hopefully cooler heads prevail and Carter Hart remains the starting goaltender for years to come. Any other outcome could become one of the most scrutinized moves in recent Flyers’ history, and think of the ground that covers.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: Getty Images
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