2023-24 NHL team preview: Philadelphia Flyers

LAST SEASON

For the Philadelphia Flyers, returning to relevance in the summer of 2022 was as simple as signing Johnny Gaudreau, a star player from the area who was only an unrestricted free agent because he wanted to leave Western Canada for the American Northeast. The Flyers botched it nonetheless, failing to clear enough cap space to present Gaudreau with an offer.

Their failed Johnny Hockey gambit, the injury-induced semi-retirement of Ryan Ellis, another back surgery for Sean Couturier, and the loss of Cam Atkinson to a procedure of his own meant that, though the Flyers were not officially rebuilding, anyone could see they were one of the weakest teams in the Eastern Conference.

Some combination of coach John Tortorella, goaltender Carter Hart, and a career season from sniper Travis Konecny allowed the team to reach .500 as late as February, but a league-worst power play and loaded Metropolitan Division conspired to land Philadelphia a second consecutive bottom-seven finish in the league by the end of the season.

The team’s punchless offense and inability to trade valued veterans at the deadline was enough to finally show inept GM Chuck Fletcher the door, bring in a new group of executives led by former Flyers Danny Briere and Keith Jones, and finally say the magic word “rebuild.” With the old guard of James van Riemsdyk, Kevin Hayes and Ivan Provorov gone, things will get worse before they get better on Broad Street.

KEY ADDITIONS & DEPARTURES

Additions

Cal Petersen, G
Sean Walker, D
Garnet Hathaway, RW
Ryan Poehling, C
Marc Staal, D
Victor Mete, D

Departures

Ivan Provorov, D (Cbj)
Kevin Connauton, D (LA)
Hayden Hodgson, RW, (LA)
Kevin Hayes, C (Stl)
Kieffer Bellows, LW (UFA)
Brendan Lemieux, LW (Car)
James van Riemsdyk, LW (Bos)
Jackson Cates, C (UFA)
Max Wilman, C (UFA)
Justin Braun, D (DEL)
Tony DeAngelo, D (Car)

OFFENSE

The Flyers were terrible on offense throughout 2022-23, tying Nashville for the fourth-worst attack in the NHL and finishing dead last on the man advantage, where they converted on just 15.6% of attempts. Granted, Tony DeAngelo, Hayes, and van Riemsdyk saw their ice time allocated to young players as the year moved on, and while they could have helped, there is no justifying how anemic the Flyers were in front of the net.

Despite a rough season in the goal-scoring department, Philadelphia did produce some notable bright spots. Konecny led the team with 31 goals and 61 points in only 60 games. After the agitator’s scoring fell off a cliff over the past two seasons, increased volume in 2022-23 (his 20:07 average ice time led Flyers forwards) made clear Konecny has finally turned the corner. A year after he buried just 7.3% of his shots, ‘TK’ arrived as a legitimate top-line player.

Where Konecny proved his value as a high-end top-six player, former first-rounders Owen Tippett and Morgan Frost proved they belonged in the NHL. Tippett arrived in Philadelphia in 2022 as part of the Claude Giroux trade. Last season, Tippett showed that all he was missing in Florida was an opportunity; the former Mississauga Steelhead deposited 27 goals at a sustainable 11.2% shooting clip. Frost did not find his feet as quickly as Tippett but exploded for 17 of his 46 points in the final 21 games of the season after Tortorella moved him up the lineup, where Frost should stay based on early returns.

Though a combined 125 points of scoring packed up and left this offseason in the form of mercurial center Hayes, veteran goalscorer van Riemsdyk, and power play merchant DeAngelo, the rest of the Flyers offensive group is not as bad as one would expect from a rebuilding team. Couturier and Atkinson are essentially offseason acquisitions after returning to health despite leading the team in scoring in 2020-21 and 2021-22, respectively. Their net-driving play styles will conform to Tortorella’s insistence on physicality; Atkinson previously played for the hard-nosed coach in Columbus.

Tyson Foerster is a rookie who should play a similar role to Tippett’s after leading the AHL Lehigh Valley Phantoms in scoring, and Joel Farabee is yet another player who makes his living on his shot; most observers have been willing to write off his unimpressive 2022-23 campaign (15G, 39P in 82GP) as the result of offseason neck surgery, and the duo would give the Flyers sneaky depth on the wings. Up the middle, playmaking is scarce beyond Frost, but former Selke Trophy winner Couturier, team leader Scott Laughton, and Noah Cates, who received Calder and Selke votes last season, will at least ensure the other guys can’t score.

Another reason to watch? If the Flyers can’t play, at least they can fight. Nic Deslauriers remains a feared heavyweight, and newcomer Garnet Hathaway is one of the most maligned pests in the NHL.

DEFENSE

The Flyers’ forwards are not too bad for a team built to lose games, but their defensive corps covers the difference. The group is not particularly young, cheap, or effective; the sooner Briere starts pawning off spare parts, the sooner he and Tortorella know which rookies can replace the current rag-tag crew.

Rasmus Ristolainen and Travis Sanheim are nominally the top pair as the lone surviving duo from 2022-23 because of a combined price tag north of $11M. With Provorov gone to Columbus and the “DeAngelo as a real top-four defenseman” experiment mercifully over, Tortorella will look for a new overmatched pairing to log 22 minutes a night. Enter Sanheim and ‘Risto,’ who controlled just 47% of high-danger chances together last season.

Ristolainen became a favorite of Tortorella because of his work ethic, attitude, and physicality, but the big Swede’s offensive game is shot after years of hard miles. The book is written on Sanheim, an able puck-mover but nothing more at either end of the ice. Though he played well in limited minutes beside rookie Cam York, Sanheim did little to justify his baffling eight-year extension. If Sanheim can turn his elite speed into productivity or Ristolainen can rediscover the passing vision that made him a regular 30-point scorer in Buffalo, perhaps this pair can overachieve. If not, it will be a long year on the Wells Fargo Center blueline.

Cam York will be the only defender Philadelphia fans are excited to watch on opening night. He was great as a rookie, one of just four Flyers (along with van Riemsdyk, Tippett, and Seeler) to finish in the positives for high-danger chances and expected goals. Those stats do a decent job of showing who controls the pace of play when they are on the ice, and that York was among the team’s leaders as a 22-year-old is a testament to his composure on the puck. There’s more to come from the former Michigan Wolverine on offense, whose 18 assists in 54 games will buy him time on the power play in DeAngelo’s absence.

Sean Walker, a stay-at-home righty, could partner with York after arriving from Los Angeles as part of a cap dump tied to the Provorov trade. The Kings could not afford Walker’s bottom-pair minutes for $2.5M, but he’s an honest player who will do nothing to stunt York’s development at the very least. Walker, Nick Seeler, and an incoming Marc Staal are all hardworking defensemen who will be candidates for midseason trades thanks to their respective expiring deals; Seeler is especially interesting thanks to a career-best 2022-23 season and league minimum salary. If a playoff team that needs help on the PK swoops in, Phantoms Egor Zamula and Ronnie Attard are waiting in the wings.

GOALTENDING

No one knew what to expect from Carter Hart coming into 2022-23. The Albertan imploded two seasons prior, posting an .877 save percentage in 2020-21, and was shaky at best the following year. With the notoriously gristly Tortorella coming on board, there was every chance Hart would collapse again and all that early career promise would go to waste. Instead, the 25-year-old stepped up to win 22 games for a roster that would have struggled to compete in the AHL on some nights. 

Hart was responsible for 72% of Philadelphia’s 75 points, and his relatively pedestrian raw numbers (2.92 GAA, .907 SV%) largely came down to the sloppy play in front of him. Hart was 16th in the NHL in goals saved above expected, which measures the danger of shots faced, and third among goaltenders on losing teams behind Darcy Kuemper of Washington and Sam Montembeault of Montreal. Hart might be elite elsewhere, a scenario the Flyers have become all too familiar with over the last decade of Sergei Bobrovsky winning Vezina Trophies.

Cal Petersen came to Philadelphia with Walker in the Provorov trade as the Kings ditched his disastrous $5M cap hit. Petersen has regressed in each of his pro seasons, bottoming out over 10 games last year before being banished to the AHL. The Flyers are not exactly married to the Notre Dame alum and needed a 2024 second-rounder and a defensive prospect in Helge Grans to take him on that number. 

If Petersen rediscovers his early promise, a cheaper extension or salary-retained trade could become an option. If not, he will clear waivers and make way for rookie Sam Ersson, who started 6-0 in the NHL last season and will likely begin the year behind a capable Phantoms defense. Ersson is not an elite athlete, but Tortorella loves his veteran temperament and positional awareness.

COACHING

Tortorella is as entrenched as any coach in the NHL, having convinced the Flyers brass that he has an active interest in fostering an organizational turnaround on and off the ice. He even wrote the team’s season ticket holders a letter on the subject in the middle of last season, and new team chairman Dan Hilferty often mentions him in the same breath as Jones and Briere. In short, Torts is not going anywhere.

He and longtime right-hand man Brad Shaw are more focused on coaxing the maximum effort and productivity from each of their players than Xs and Os, but even they must realize special teams were an issue last year. The power play will improve from Atkinson, Couturier, and possibly Foerster’s introductions, but a Tortorella-coached team with such capable defensive forwards should kill more than 74.7% of its penalties.

ROOKIES

Foerster and Ersson stand out after memorable NHL debuts last season. While the latter’s heroics in goal impressed, the former managed three goals and seven points in 8 games with the Flyers. He is a near-certainty to make the opening night roster, while Ersson is the next man up if Hart moves teams or Petersen falters.

The Phantoms have plenty of prospects that would love the Flyers to sell at the trade deadline. 24-year-old defenseman Attard is still officially a rookie but is desperate to show off the two-way game that made him an AHL All-Star last season. He and Grans could fill a need on the right side of the Flyers’ defense.

If a forward or two changes cities, do-it-all center Elliot Desnoyers would have the most to gain; he led the Phantoms in goals last season with 23 despite his reputation as a penalty-killing faceoff winner. Could collegiate mega prospect Cutter Gauthier join him on the big team by the end of the season?

BURNING QUESTIONS

1. How bad can this team get? When a team is mired in mediocrity as long as the Flyers have been, calls to tear it down come from the fans. That might be easier said than done in Philadelphia. Tortorella, ironically the biggest proponent of the team’s rebuild, is a specialist in winning games with underwhelming rosters. Sanheim and Ristolainen are too expensive to move, Atkinson and Couturier carry injury questions on the wrong side of 30, and talented rookies are joining up with regularity. The Flyers are not as terrible as Briere and Jones would like.

2. Is anyone untouchable? Konecny is the closest thing the Flyers have to a star, and the team will naturally take calls for the forward; his youth and manageable cap hit make him a desirable asset for any playoff contender. What about Hart? The netminder is a pending RFA, and teams will always overpay for good goaltending. Is his trade value worth starting over in net for the umpteenth time? Laughton will also be a target, but Briere needs to think hard about whether a second-round pick is worth the leaders at the forefront of the culture Tortorella has tried to build.

3. What’s going on in Russia? The Flyers scored a critically rare feel-good win at the 2023 Draft by picking Matvei Michkov seventh overall after his KHL commitments scared at least three teams away from a player hailed as a future superstar. Were those fears well founded? The KHL and IIHF are in a staring contest, ironically over would-be Flyers goalie Ivan Fedotov, which further tests an already strained relationship between Russia and the rest of the hockey world.

PREDICTION

The Eastern Conference is very good and the Flyers are very bad. That should be enough to offset the team’s modest improvements and land them in the top five of next year’s draft, but Tortorella is a monkey wrench in the franchise’s race to the bottom. His ability to whip shabby rosters into shape and a potential fire sale are variables that could determine whether the Flyers are a run-of-the-mill lottery team or a dead-last basement dweller.