We’re now officially past the one-third mark of the season, and the Flyers … are doing OK! They’re 15-10-3, they’d won four games in a row before last night’s OT loss in Nashville, and they’re in a playoff position in the standings. A postseason berth is very much a thing that could happen this year. The team is also rebuilding. It’s all strange. But the vibes are positive.
So, let’s take some stock on every player on the roster that’s played in meaningful minutes and point out one thing about their season. It may be observational, may be analytical, may be nonsense, who knows. Let’s dive in, in jersey-numerical order, starting with the forwards. (Any statistics cited are courtesy of Evolving-Hockey unless otherwise noted. I tried to update them through last night’s game but my bad if I missed any.)
Bobby Brink
One way that Brink’s high-motor, relentless style and intelligence on the ice have both been on display: penalties. Brink is second on the team in minor penalties drawn per 60 minutes of ice time, behind only Garnet Hathaway, who gives a decent amount of that advantage back because he takes a lot of penalties himself. Brink doesn’t, and so the end result is pretty positive — of the 340 forwards who have played at least 250 minutes of ice time entering Tuesday’s games, Brink is 11th in penalty differential. And hey, I can’t even make the obvious follow-up joke about how he’s actually hurting the team by putting them on the power play, because he’s tied for the team lead in power play goals! (With two of them. God, this power play is really pathetic.)
Travis Konecny
The argument that last offseason was the right time for a freshly-rebuilding team to trade Travis Konecny made some sense. He was coming off a career year last year (with a slightly inflated shooting percentage), he’s in his prime, and he’s now this season plus one more away from a free agency deal that a rebuilding team probably shouldn’t hand out to a will-be-28-year-old. As much as it was clear Konecny was a guy who gained John Tortorella’s trust, this was a guy who felt like he was at his peak value.
Unless he wasn’t and this is just who he is? What if Travis Konecny’s just A Real Dude? Not to get carried away here and suggest he can be one of the three or so best players on a contender or anything, but he might pretty firmly be establishing as fact that he can be somewhere in the range of the fourth- or fifth-or-so best player on a contender. Even with a relatively quiet November he’s on pace to top his career high in goals that he set last year while only slightly overperforming his individual expected goals rate (which is also at a career-best). He’s creating more opportunities for himself than ever at 5-on-5, which speaks to both how bad the power play has been and how it’s gotta help at least a bit to have Sean Couturier back (more on him in just a moment), and while his PK work on the whole has been hit or miss, tough to argue too much with a league-lead-tying three shorties already this season.
Konecny taking a step forward (or at the very least showing that his improvement last year was no fluke) was the only way to make not trading him look like a good option. Now, you can either demand more for him in a trade knowing what the track record is, or you can consider asking the question of whether you hang on to him beyond next year. It’d be aggressive and would be a clear signal that they think the rebuild is ahead of schedule, especially knowing you’re still a year away from Matvei Michkov’s likely rookie season when that hypothetical contract begins, but there’s a timeline where it’s justifiable in a way that doesn’t feel like it existed even just a few months ago.
Sean Couturier
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