After the NHL draft lottery confirmed the Philadelphia Flyers pick remained at 12th overall, the questions now shift to the draft itself and what exactly Danny Briere plans on doing with the 10 picks the team owns.
Along with the 12th overall selection, the Flyers also possess the Florida Panthers’ first round pick, which if they get eliminated in the second round they’ll likely pick 27th or 28th. A Conference Final loss would put them 29th or 30th, and a Cup appearance would place that pick at 31st or 32nd.
The consensus heading into the draft is that once Macklin Celebrini goes first overall to San Jose, there’s about a dozen players with nearly identical ceilings then a drop off occurs around the 13 to 15 mark to your usual crapshoot prospects.
Even though the Flyers didn’t win the lottery, there’s still a possibility of moving up in the order through trades.
Now, the Flyers have stuck by their “rebuilding” mantra despite a season that was counterintuitive to a typical rebuild, but if they’re hellbent on sticking to their guns on this one, it means that wheeling and dealing at the draft is the best place to make up for the damage their play did to their rankings.
Even though there were no draft day deals last season, the Flyers were the only team to buy into the 2023 first round before the draft thanks to the Ivan Provorov trade with Columbus.
Can the Flyers manage to package 12 and FLA’s pick together to sneak into the top 10? Maybe a team like Ottawa at 7th overall would have more interest in moving back as their focus should be main roster improvements rather than drafting.
Or if they can’t move up from 12, they could always attempt to package a second round pick with Florida’s late 20s pick and move into the 15-ish range currently held by Detroit.
And there’s always the third option of dealing those first rounders for immediate help at the NHL level. The Flyers have a bad rap when it comes to trading first round picks for main roster help, but the truth is they’ve only traded out of the first round once since 2010, that coming in 2021 when they traded the 14th overall pick for Rasmus Ristolainen. While it’s an option the Flyers definitely need to consider, it’s also a very unlikely outcome.
They’ve got two firsts, two seconds and one third in this year’s draft, and 10 picks in the first three rounds between 2024 and 2025. While the quantity is great, quality should be their main focus. Drafting two random guys at 12 and 28 and just assuming they’ll be major parts of the rebuild strategy moving forward, isn’t necessarily a solid building strategy for future success.
But in fairness to the Flyers, the organization has drafted well since the arrival of Brent Flahr in late 2018. How they’ve gone about developing the prospects as they reach the professional level is a bit of a different story, but they’ve shown a willingness to make draft day deals to move around the board and get the players they want.
The reality is, the Flyers should be exhausting all options when it comes to their strategy on draft day. They’re in a rebuild, after all. And there’s a good chance Briere and Flahr have something up their sleeves when the draft rolls around in late June. All we can hope is that there’s some willing dance partners on night one to swap picks with unlike last season.
Let Briere cook, as the kids say.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: nhl.com
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