July has turned the corner to wind down, and the regular season will be here for the Flyers before we or they know it. With just a few bits of business left to take care of over these next couple of months, the Flyers all but set as the next new season approaches, and their projected lineup is already beginning to take shape.
And even though the Flyers won’t be adding another forward into the mix after losing out on Leo Carlsson, their standing forward group is looking a little crowded, and that could pose some real challenges for them as the season opens up, and place a promising prospect like Alex Bump at a bit of a crossroads.
Breaking down the logjam
With the announcement of Trevor Zegras’s extension made late Wednesday night, the Flyers officially locked down all members of their NHL forward group, and it’s one that has already pretty reasonably taken shape. This arrangement could well change come training camp based on performance or availability (more on that later), but based on what they were running at different points late in the last season, we can approximate the lines, imagine that they’ll look something like this when the season opens.
Tyson Foerster — Trevor Zegras — Owen Tippett
Travis Konecny — Christian Dvorak — Porter Martone
Denver Barkey — Noah Cates — Matvei Michkov
Nikita Grebenkin — Sean Couturier — Noel Acciari
The Flyers’ lineup hasn’t changed too dramatically from last season’s trade deadline to now — they lost Nic Deslauriers at the deadline but gained Porter Martone shortly thereafter, and effectively swapped in role Garnet Hathaway for Noel Acciari, so while there is a bit of a different look here, major moves haven’t been made to clear up lineup spots for younger players. This means that the Flyers will be looking at rolling into the season with a full roster of as many as 14 forwards (though that would come down to 13 if they opt to send the newly re-signed Carl Grundstrom down to the AHL to start the season again), and Bump, as the least experienced of the trio of himself, Denver Barkey, and Matvei Michkov — who seemed to form the main rotation by the time the postseason rolled around — perhaps on the outside looking in.
These roles aren’t set in stone, and the door does remain open for Bump to come out like gangbusters and put in an effort so strong as to displace a more experienced or higher upsided player out of a place in the top-9, but that’s a big ask, and it’s more realistic to read this as a continuation of the same situation as there was last season — the numbers game is such that Bump sits in something of a fringe spot in this lineup, and would have to take part in some sort of rotation in order to get meaningful minutes, held back from a graduation to the status of every night regular.
The Nikita Grebenkin of it all
Of course, at least to start the season, things will open up if Grebenkin isn’t advanced in his recovery enough that he’s ready to jump headlong into action out of training camp. His status has been a little nebulous since he took an undisclosed injury all the way back in March, and while no precise timeline was provided for his return, he remained the only injured player at the end of the season who was still a possibility to miss some time at the start of the next season. Now, some good news came at the end of last month, in the fact that Grebenkin was able to get back on the ice and into some drill settings with the prospects at Development Camp, but it isn’t a definitive statement on his availability for proper game action.
If Grebenkin’s recovery stretches even longer into the season, a lineup spot is still Bump’s to lose, but if Grebenkin is out of the mix in those training camp battles, there is a bit more wiggle room built into the equation for Bump. It doesn’t completely negate the need for this difficult decision to be made at some point, it just kicks the can down the road a bit, but it does offer perhaps a bit more latitude for a player like Bump who, as we saw all the way back in last season’s training camp, can seem to get a bit in his own head at times and let his level of on-ice play slip as a result. The margin for error will still be somewhat thin, but with some experience and goodwill banked as well, his positioning gets a little more favorable.
Threading the needle
At the end of the day, the Flyers will need to return to the big discussion which unfolds with most prospects as they sit on the fringe of the taking off of their NHL careers. By the end of the postseason, Bump was sitting in something of a platoon role — deserving of a spot in the lineup but having that spot be hard to come by, but waiting in the wings all the same for his moment — and while he did deliver quite positive results when called upon, one wonders if this is a model of deployment for him which is productive and sustainable. That is, it’s the age-old question once again, whether a player like Bump would benefit more from playing in a platoon role with the NHL squad until an injury earns him a more permanent spot and taking his lessons from watching from above as they unfold, or from playing as many minutes as humanly possible down a level with the Phantoms.
Bump’s middling training camp showing last time around helped the Flyers make that decision, and for as much as he impressed in his somewhat limited showings with the Flyers at the end of the season, if the roster is full come training camp and Bump delivers a similarly underwhelming performance, it isn’t hard to imagine this management group airing on the side of patience and giving him some more time in the minors to reset.
But for Bump, all things considered, this might not even be the worst thing for him. He showed well in his AHL time last season, and clearly did enough in the organization’s eyes to earn himself a recall at the end of the season, but given the time that he missed with injury, there could well be still lessons to be learned from the staff down there, and opportunities to be had to continue to refine his game through a high workload and, perhaps just as critically, a good chance for Bump to step into more of a leadership role and impart some wisdom to some of the team’s incoming rookies. In this way, there seems no wrong answer to this quandary, but how the Flyers approach this situation will reveal a good bit about how they see their standing as a team — to prioritize keeping a well-stocked bank of good and productive healthy scratches rather than giving a prospect a bit of extra seasoning in the AHL signals a shift towards an even more competitive mindset, a decisive step forward after last season’s postseason foray.
