The first round of the 2024 NHL Entry Draft is just days away. If you wanted to count down the hours, you really could and it wouldn’t be completely outrageous. So, of course, right now, anyone covering the sport is pumping out their own mock drafts and determining who will be selected where and by what team.
Some writers are much more educated and sourced on these decisions, while others are simply doing it because it would be weird if they are a hockey site that doesn’t have a mock draft right now. Hell, even we did one for every pick the Philadelphia Flyers are making this weekend (but we have watched some tape, at least a little bit).
Instead of skimming through all the lists and ranking and mock drafts, it’s probably best just to see who these writers and prospect experts have the Flyers taking with their first-round selections. We have already covered who some mock drafts have the team taking with their 12th overall pick, but now it is time for the second decision they will be making on Friday night.
So, who do these people have the Flyers taking at 32nd overall?
Chris Peters — Andrew Basha, LW
Chris Peters of FloHockey is one of the top draft experts around and for his most recent mock draft this year, he has the Flyers taking highly skilled winger Andrew Basha with the last selection of the first round.
This would be one of those picks that if the Flyers opt to stay a little more safe — picking someone like center Konsta Helenius at 12th overall — then this is the big swing to take with the other pick. Basha is a dynamic winger out of the WHL’s Medicine Hat Tigers and has above-average grades in just about every aspect of the game.
When you think of a speedy winger who can play the game at a high pace, it’s typically those waterbug-esque players that are usually on the smaller side, but Basha is 6-foot and 185 pounds this season, so he should certainly have an NHL body to go with NHL-level top speed to his game. Some scouts think that even if Basha’s skill can’t carry him to a top-six role on a team, he has the work ethic and energy to be a very good bottom-six forward in the NHL.
Local lad Adam Kimelman has the Flyers taking the steady defenseman EJ Emery at 32nd overall and we don’t hate it.
Emery is a physical freak, in the best way possible. If you were paying attention to the draft combine even a little bit, his name came up as someone just breaking records and beating the rest of the competition in a whole lot of testing. He is a blueliner out of the national program, is 6-foot-3, 185 pounds, and is right handed. That just feels like a recipe for success.
The only knock on Emery is that he doesn’t really top out as being able to be an offensive threat in professional hockey. His skating and physicality is among the top in terms of blueliners in this draft class, and he can shutdown just about any opposing player, but he will not be out there on the power play or anything of that ilk.
If the Flyers were to take him, it would be to really compliment Jamie Drysdale being on the same blue line — if we are thinking a few years down the road. If Emery can add just a little bit of offense to his game — he earned just 16 assists in 61 games for the national program last season — while at the University of North Dakota, he should be an intriguing prospect. At the end of the first round, this is not a bad pick at all.
Mike G. Morreale — Andrew Basha, LW
We have already praised Basha for what a great prospect he could be for the Flyers, so check out this sick highlight tape:
Corey Pronman — Sam O’Reilly, C
This is where it gets interesting. The Athletic’s Corey Pronman and Scott Wheeler — we can link him in here as well, since he has the same player mocked to the Flyers — have been pretty spot-on when it comes to connecting the player to the pick to the team, in an almost freakish way. So, when they both connected the dots between center Sam O’Reilly and the Flyers, there is no doubt smoke there.
And it makes perfect sense. Keith Jones likes the London Knights organization and is friends with the Hunter family over there that run the New York Yankees of the Ontario Hockey League, and they just drafted both Oliver Bonk and Denver Barkey from that program last year. To get a centerman from the team wouldn’t be out of the question.
What does O’Reilly bring that makes him a real possibility at 32nd overall? His best attributes, according to some scouts, is his physicality, hockey sense, and passing. He isn’t the fleetest of foot, and doesn’t score a whole lot of goals, but he is just a smart hockey player that has a tendancy to get under the skin of opponents.
O’Reilly feels like a Flyer in the best way. Sort of the same way with Barkey last year, O’Reilly is a nasty player who has a high work ethic, strong motor, is versatile positionally, but his main attribute is just being a pure pest that can shutdown offenses. We wouldn’t hate this pick at all, depending on who else is there.
A selection of O’Reilly would only hurt if some other, high-ceiling players like Teddy Stiga, for example, were available also.
Yegor Surin is a very solid pick, honestly. He doesn’t have one aspect of his game that stands out from the rest, though. While other players potentially available in this range are very good at one thing, that makes them an enticing prospect, Surin is just a solid player.
He doesn’t have the same level of hockey sense as others, but his skating is good, and his more tangible skills like shooting, passing, and handling the puck, are above-average. He scored 52 points in 42 games in the MHL last season and should be working his way up to a role in the KHL eventually.
Surin is just one of those players whose thought process might lag behind the tools he has, but he is no doubt a solid selection, if the development work can be done.
McKeen’s Hockey — Ben Danford, D
Ben Danford is a hockey nerd’s type of player and we appreciate McKeen’s Hockey putting him in the Flyers’ system. He didn’t put up a large number of points (had 33 points in 64 games for the OHL’s Oshawa Generals), but he is essentially a right-handed defenseman that should have the ability to kill plays all throughout his career.
It’s not exciting to get a defense-first player in the first round, but Danford feels like one of the more translatable players available. While he isn’t flashy, the way he is prone to distribute the puck in short bursts, have vision to set up his forwards in front of him, and on top of that be positionally extremely smart, has him on a trajectory to quickly make an NHL team that can utilize his all-around defensive skill to not look out of place.
Certainly, a high-floor, low-ceiling type of defenseman. But that’s also what we said about Oliver Bonk and look at him now.
The Athletic — Dominik Badinka, D
Wow, another two-way blueliner going to the hypothetical Philadelphia Flyers. It feels like this is a general theme. Since the Flyers have two first-round selections, one of them have to be a “safe” pick and The Athletic’s staff mock draft pairing them up with Czech defenseman Dominik Badinka feels that way.
Badinka played most of his year in the Swedish Hockey League, so he already has the experience playing among grown men as a teenaged prospect, but beyond where he played, Badinka is a smart defenseman that has high defensive instincts and can distribute the puck well enough to firmly establish his potential as a middle-pairing NHL blueliner.
He is just a mature player who is beyond his years on the ice, who wouldn’t be a terrible selection at all if the Flyers want to go with a more projectable defenseman with pick No. 32.
Sam Cosentino — Julius Miettenen, C
Finally, not a defenseman.
Julius Miettenen is an attractive pick for any NHL team. He is a 6-foot-3 center who scored over a point-per-game in the WHL for the Everett Silvertips whose main priority on the ice is to shutdown the other team. Beyond every single other attribute, Miettenen’s physicality stands above his skating, shooting ability, and general hockey sense. He has used his size to get the better in the Canadian juniors.
With that, comes concern that the only reason he was able to get those points was because he was larger than a whole lot of opposing players.
There really isn’t much to mention about Miettenen because at the highest peak, he is just a solid, defense-first, third-line center on a decent team. He won’t shock the world with any moves, but if a team wants to just get an NHL player out of their pick, it’s taking Julius Miettenen.
We get the sense that the Flyers do not want that. The whole purpose of this rebuild is to get more top-end talent and we don’t think that Miettenen is one of the top 32 most-skilled players available in this draft class, so we don’t really expect this to be the selection. Centers like Sam O’Reilly would probably be the preferred option if Philadelphia did want to go with a high-floor type of forward.
