The Philadelphia Flyers spent their first season under GM Danny Briere supposedly under a renewed rebuilding effort, but they spent the campaign doing some counterintuitive things to their stated goal, and it was most obvious in the form of prospect development.
On the whole, the Flyers didn’t do a great job at integrating their prospects. Their hot and cold nature to a guy like Bobby Brink and very limited usage of Olle Lycksell plus their end-of-season snubbings of Adam Ginning and Ronnie Attard doesn’t exactly paint a great picture to look back on, or give a ton of promise to look forward to.
And this isn’t the first time the questionable use of prospects led to dismissing them rather than attempting make the pieces fit.
Looking back on the 2022-23 season, the Flyers had a few prospects make the main roster as well. Most notably Wade Allison and Tanner Laczynski, who were serving their first full seasons in the NHL. While both players did have injury spells, they weren’t exactly utilized to their fullest potential when they were healthy.
Both played primarily fourth line, defense-heavy minutes, a pigeonhole that effected Allison and his hard-nosed, crash-the-net style particularly hard.
Then, instead of giving them more opportunity after earning their stripes grinding out their rookie campaigns, heading into the 2023-24 season they were both cut from the main roster and neither returned. The front office deemed them failures and opted for a fresh batch of NHL-AHL tweeners to put through the wringer instead.
And therein lies the question- How do they go about handing the fringe guys from 2023-24 during the 2024-25 season?
Whenever this topic gets brought up on social media, the response is quickly dismissed by the fans by simply suggesting that the prospects simply suck and don’t deserve an opportunity, or they point to players like Cam York and Tyson Foerster as examples that have made it, thus their development strategy isn’t flawed.
Yeah, a few players have snuck through the cracks and were integrated rather painlessly onto the roster. But guys like York and Foerster are more in the “can’t miss” category as clear-cut NHLers. The rest of the players, like Brink, Lycksell, Attard, Andrae, etc, players that require a bit of fine tuning and time to develop and adjust to the NHL level haven’t been given the same luxury. It’s been an unnecessarily difficult uphill battle for them, especially under the guise of a rebuild.
And it is possible some of the prospects just aren’t cut out for the NHL. The Flyers have had their share of “quad-A” guys over the years- players too good for the AHL but not quite good enough to be NHL staples. But there should be some level of trial before that call is made. 18 games playing less than 10 minutes a night in the case of Olle Lycksell, doesn’t really qualify as a proper sample size.
This is not necessarily a piece to convince you, the reader, that Olle Lycksell and Ronnie Attard are going to be stars, but rather highlighting that one of the key reasons Stanley Cup teams are successful is their ability to cycle depth players into the team, find those diamonds in the rough and don’t go out of their way to sabotage their own players, certainly not to the extent the Flyers do.
Especially when factoring in the whole “rebuild” ideology the organization is attempting to sell, burning through their potential NHL prospects at an alarming rate without really giving it their all when it comes to developing them isn’t a great look.
So what fate awaits players like Bobby Brink, Olle Lycksell and Ronnie Attard during the 2024-25 season? At his end-of-season press conference, Briere did mention Attard, Andrae and Brink by name as players he expects to be in the think of a main roster battle in 2024-25, but considering nearly the entire roster is already under contract (including all 12 forwards and 5 defensemen), it doesn’t bode well for the idea that a bigger slice of responsibility is headed their way naturally.
Any subtractions made during the summer will probably be addressed in a correlating move, like buying out Cam Atkinson in favor of replacing him with a nearly identical bottom six clone for “leadership and culture” reasons, rather than handing the baton to Brink and let him rise though the lineup.
It’s going to be a very interesting summer for Briere and the front office as their internal battle with their own rebuilding narrative will be put to the test. Can John Tortorella and the rest of the front office finally get out of their own way and let some youth blossom? Or will the middling, unwilling-to-commit-to-any-direction attitude continue? It’s a question that will show up the most in the handling of their prospect development, and if the last few years are anything to go on, it won’t be an easy query to resolve.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: Getty Images
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