Sometimes, grass can be greener on the other side. For Ryan Poehling, he is really hoping that his upcoming time in Philadelphia goes a little bit better than the previous stints in Pittsburgh and Montreal. The former Canadiens first-round pick got off to his career extremely hot. In his first ever game, in a game that didn\'t matter, he ended up scoring a hat trick. Not just a couple of assists to make a splash into the league, but a full-blown hat trick. Looking back, it might have been a curse disguised as a blessing because that was the final game of the 2018-19 regular season and it set expectations for the following year to be sky high. It didn\'t end up as nice as a hat trick. Poehling would score just two points in 27 games for Montreal, as well as 13 in 36 games for the AHL\'s Laval Rockets. Not the best start to a professional career after setting their own bar unreachable. Poehling would play the entire 2020-21 season in the AHL, almost reaching a point per game, and then had the best season of his NHL career the following season with a whole 17 points in 57 games. That was enough for Montreal to unqualify him, sending him to unrestricted free agency early, and then he signed a one-year deal in Pittsburgh. And as we can see, it didn\'t turn out so hot. Let\'s just hope the Flyers\' experiment with getting a former first-rounder turns out a little bit better. 2022-23 Rundown Games PlayedGoalsAssistsPoints5v5 CF%5v5 xGF%53771449.6853.13stats via Elite Prospects/Natural Stat Trick What did we see from Poehling last season? Not a whole lot! While other similar experiments have worked out for the Penguins, because they can just try and put nobodies on a line with Sidney Crosby to see if it clicks, getting Poehling involved felt weird and it ended up being weird. He was fine, if you consider that he was essentially on their fourth line for the entire season and spent just 6:28 of 5-on-5 ice-time with Crosby, and 4:52 with Evgeni Malkin. He wasn\'t given the star-studded treatment, but instead hung out with Teddy Blueger and Josh Archibald for most of his time in Eastern Pennsylvania. We can\'t just blame his season on not being with skilled players, but it also wasn\'t the best situation to be put in while also averaging under 12 minutes a night. He was heralded as a skilled player before he hit the NHL, and then it ended up that he was just a fourth-liner that once scored a hat trick. What type of role do we expect Poehling to play this season? It will be interesting to see where Poehling is deployed. With more automatic fourth-liners like Nic Deslauriers, Garnet Hathaway, and Tanner Laczynski possibly on the team, where John Tortorella puts Poehling in the lineup might do some good for him. Because of those three players listed, maybe Hathaway is the only player where you can say is more skilled than Poehling, but that also is a fairly low bar. Like trying to decide who is the better airline pilot: me or my dog. Regardless, we should expect a bottom-six role no matter what for Poehling, whether that is on a gritty, grinding fourth line, or a third line with a little bit more pizzazz that could feature Morgan Frost and Wade Allison, for example. What would make for a successful season for Poehling? A successful season would just be building on the previous one in Pittsburgh. A whole 14 points isn\'t enough to justify his spot, even on a terrible Philadelphia team, but something over the 20-point mark in the bottom-six can certainly get us there. Overall, if he doesn\'t look terrible in his role and we could at least dream a little bit of him still being here when the team is good again, that would be an overwhelmingly successful season with the context of being on the Flyers. Unfortunately, the more likely one is that GM Danny Briere tried to squeeze some of that last potential juice out of a former solid prospect, but Poehling kept on showing his true colors as just a replacement-level NHL player, ending his career in Philadelphia at one year and him being sent on his way as more prospects graduate to the NHL. We\'re just trying to stay humble and predict normal stuff.