How can they make sure Matvei Michkov has a productive summer?
It’s certainly at the top of the mind of just about every single fan of this team. After having a fairly disappointing sophomore season, full of controversy surrounding how the coach is handling his ice time and how he came into this season fairly unprepared conditioning-wise; how Matvei Michkov approaches this summer is top priority.
What we saw last season was outstanding for a rookie. What we saw this season was a step back as more responsibilities were put on him and he was not treated like a player that was “put on a pedestal”, as Rick Tocchet would say. With that need for him to not just score points but be a defensive blackhole, and his lack of preparation, this season did not go smoothly.
Now, Michkov knows what to expect and what Tocchet wants from him. He needs to go into this summer with specific direction and motivation to be the team’s best winger. He certainly has the offensive talent to reach that potential one day — we saw it all last season — and there should be a fire lit under him now to truly become that.
We will be highly anticipating the first looks of him at training camp and what Tocchet’s first impressions are, and then we can either be super excited about him getting more opportunity, or be even more bummed out.
What can they do to improve the power play?
Okay, maybe we lied that Michkov improving will be the first thing that we think about all summer long, because the Flyers’ power play is so much more concerning.
The fact that this team has now gone several years as one of the NHL’s worst power plays and appears to be completely inept and even getting some consistency on the man advantage is mind-boggling. There are teams like the Nashville Predators, who have just a bunch of old guys and some prospects and did not even come close to finishing in the top half of the overall standings, and they have the 11th-highest conversion rate in the league. The New York Rangers for goodness sake had the fifth-best!
It is a crisis that the Flyers’ power play can be this bad. It might be an overreaction but it feels like we’re wasting the seasons of some players since we can’t cobble together a successful power play and then get them scoring more goals than they have been.
Rick Tocchet said after Game 4 and the Flyers were eliminated from the playoffs, that the power play is going to be a massive topic this offseason. Whether it is getting the right tactic, or finding some better offensive talent elsewhere, it will be addressed in some fashion.
Just do something about it. Please. If the Flyers had even just the same conversion rate of someone like the Seattle Kraken last year, at 19.5 percent, that would mean roughly nine more goals on the season and that could mean some better individual stats for some players and would’ve meant home-ice advantage in the playoffs.
Who will be Dan Vladar’s backup?
Moving onto possibly less detrimental things, one sizeable addition the Flyers and general manager Danny Briere will need to make is getting Dan Vladar a proper backup goalie. Sam Ersson has had a very long leash and while he is a player development story going from a fifth-round pick to playing over 100 games in the NHL, he just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Ersson didn’t even have that much pressure on him with Dan Vladar set up as the team’s starter almost immediately after we saw a good string of games from him early in the season. But even in a lesser workload with just 33 games, an .870 save percentage is not even close to good enough from a backup.
The 26-year-old is a restricted free agent so the Flyers still hold his rights, but considering what he has done and how they need to address the backup position, there is a large possibility that they do not send him a qualifying offer and he is free to sign with any team he wants. And then the Flyers move to adding someone else.
It can be in a trade — they have been linked to tandem goalie Joseph Woll in Toronto before and the Leafs are stockpiled with solid netminders — or in free agency, with the likes of Stuart Skinner, Cam Talbot, Connor Ingram, and Daniil Tarasov hitting the open market. Those aren’t real top-caliber netminders but they certainly are better options than whatever Ersson would bring if the Flyers keep him around.
It certainly seems the Flyers are going to do something about it and if they do, that can mean some sizeable gains.
What will Trevor Zegras’s and Jamie Drysdale’s new contracts look like?
While we can speculate that the Flyers are going to do things, one thing that they have to do is re-sign their (other) restricted free agents.
Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale lead the group of young players that need new deals and are certainly the top priority for Briere to get these deals done. Zegras has returned to his previous form and is certainly seeming like at the very least, a good top-six winger who can play center if needed. The most positive outlook of him is as someone that can be a second-line center on a good team that can be elevated to the first line if needed.
With that established, there will be a certain price tag that the player and his agent have in mind, and there will be a number that the Flyers want to have him at. But, it certainly seems like both sides are interested in committing to this relationship for the long haul. It would be surprising if this ended up being a short-term contract, and it wouldn’t be surprising if we saw a contract extension with the term being at least six years.
As for Drysdale, he has been one of the Flyers’ most improved players and has established himself as a bona fide top-four defenseman. The offense hasn’t really come, so there is a limit to his earning potential, but it shouldn’t really be concerning if the Flyers decided to go long with this contract extension either. Even if he’s not destined to be the power-play quarterback we all wanted, he’s a solid player in the realm of Cam York and could be getting a similar five-year, $25.75-million deal. Just a thought.
The other restricted free agents with the Flyers, other than Ersson, are Nikita Grebenkin and Emil Andrae, and both of those will be short-term bridge deals no matter what. But then there’s a string of players down in the minors. Philip Tomasino, Karsen Dorwart, Jacob Gaucher, Tucker Robertson, Brett Harrison, Hunter McDonald, Christian Kyrou, Artem Guryev, and Aleksei Kolosov, are all restricted free agents this summer. Some might not be qualified. Some might be extended at league-minimum for a single year. And maybe some will be not given an NHL contract but be brought back on an AHL deal.
Some business will need to be done.
How will they address the forward makeup?
The Flyers have too many wingers and it’s only gotten worse. Briere addressed this issue by trading Bobby Brink to his hometown Minnesota Wild at the deadline, for defenseman prospect David Jiricek, but that only solved the problem temporarily. Alex Bump has come up and been one of the better offensive talents for the Flyers in the playoffs. Denver Barkey is way ahead of schedule, too.
And now they still have the other, more-established wingers like Tyson Foerster, Owen Tippett, and Travis Konecny needing minutes. And we’re not even talking about Matvei Michkov or Porter Martone yet.
Throw in Nikita Grebenkin still involved and veteran Garnet Hathaway under contract next season and that’s already nine wingers fighting for eight spots.
Sure, they can just continue with everyone in their same roles and hope that no one is begging for more minutes as a player like Tippett or Foerster or Konecny will find themselves on the third line. But that leaves no room for competition and also doesn’t help them address a pressing need of getting another center involved as an upgrade over someone like Christian Dvorak or Noah Cates, or getting another defenseman to add a workhorse to the back end, or something.
There is an opportunity to deal from a surplus to address a need, basically. But, the Flyers need to make that decision and who they should deal from that group. There’s an argument to keep just about any winger, so there will surely be several long conversations that the front office will have over the summer before they make a move.
Nevertheless, there are some massive questions heading into the summer that we will need answers for by this time next year.
