After having a stellar start to his NHL career with the Montreal Canadiens — literally, he scored a hat trick in his first career game late into the season and led many fans dream of a top-line rookie center — Ryan Poehling has not done a whole lot.
Bouncing around between the AHL and the NHL before eventually signing a one-year deal with the Pittsburgh Penguins for the 2022-23 season, Poehling was hoping to find an eventual home. Well, it just so happens that that home might have been at the other end of the state.
After once again he hit the open market before he turned 25 years old, Poehling signed a one-year deal with our beloved Philadelphia Flyers as essentially a big-league tryout. Just to see if this once-hyped, former first-round pick could find some of his game once again and be a solid player on what was supposed to be a bad team. If anything, he was thought of to raise the floor at the center position and be at least someone decent to watch so we don’t have to call up a minor-leaguer or something.
And did Poehling do just that by being just that? Well, he was certainly more than we thought he would be.
Poehling was able to stay in the lineup for all but five games this season, and really just became someone extremely stable to have down the middle.
He started his Philadelphian career as the fourth-line center, primarily playing with Garnet Hathaway and Nic Deslauriers (or some other fourth-line winger when John Tortorella didn’t need someone to punch someone else). Getting points here and there, Poehling was seen as nothing more than that. He only earned two points until a three-point night on the 15th game of the season and sort of blossomed as one of the coach’s favorites.
And you can tell his trust eventually grew into being a very solid, bottom-six center option. Through the first half of the season until the calendar flipped, Poehling averaged 13:53 time-on-ice. Once 2024 hit, through the last half of the season those minutes went up to 15:44 average time-on-ice. Some of it was necessity as Sean Couturier dealt with injuries and poor performance, but a lot of it was earned for Poehling.
Unfortunately for Poehling, he suffered from the same disease as everyone else on this team. When it came to controlling the play with things like shot attempts, high-danger chances, and expected goals, he did fairly well and had a passing grade. But due to either lack of finishing talent or goaltending at even strength, the actual goals scored while he was on the ice was in the opposition’s favor.
All the chances and shots could have been as limited as they would like, with Poehling out there, but thanks to not having two crucial things and letting results take over the underlying process, what we saw from the newcomer was solid but not worthy of a larger role.
Yeah, there’s nothing much to say about Poehling’s individual production. In his role and on this team, if he does what he does — control chances the other team has and just tries to score maybe double-digit goals — the over-arching production isn’t as important. Yes, goals are production but it’s not like we’re truly thinking Poehling is guaranteed to score that many goals, it just so happened that he did.
Three Questions
Did he live up to expectations?
Oh, certainly. Seeing that Poehling was nothing but a fourth-line center in Pittsburgh and managed to score 14 points in 53 games, not really being even a regular in the lineup, the expectations were low. He was just another body to maybe raise the floor of this team and to not be embarrassingly bad.
And of course, the team being better than everyone in the entire world expected boosted Poehling up to that level. He doubled his point total from last year and progressively got better and better and much more comfortable in the system. All of that earned him a two-year contract extension with a nice little bump in pay.
What can we expect from him next season?
If Poehling does the exact same thing he did in the second half but just stretched out to 82 games, we would be ecstatic. He can be the hypothetical third-line center when the team needs him to be, or if Couturier is back and chugging and we see Morgan Frost in the top six, and the team maybe adds a better center, then Poehling can be extra comfy as one of the best fourth-line centers around.
The base line is slightly below what he managed to do this season, but honestly, the ceiling could be a middle-six center who pots in 15 or so goals if everything breaks right and some more talent is added to his wings.
How do we grade his 2023-24 season?
It’s hard not to really like what we saw from Poehling this past year. If it’s in a vacuum, it’s not all that impressive; but with context of what we expected and his level of play before coming to Philadelphia, he passed with flying colors.
