The Philadelphia Flyers are heading into the 2026-27 NHL season as one of the league’s youngest teams and are coming off their first playoff appearance in six years. That is, of course, the Flyers’ entire situation boiled down to its most concentrated form and looking at that anyone would be highly anticipating what this team is going to look like for the next several months.
Porter Martone, Matvei Michkov, Denver Barkey, and Alex Bump is the group that is going to be at the front of everyone’s minds. This time last year, Martone was just drafted and was weeks away from playing his first game of college hockey, Michkov was coming off a stellar rookie season, there were major questions surrounding Barkey and how he would handle pro hockey, and Bump might have had even more questions after he won the national championship with Western Michigan. The hope for those players — and maybe some other young players, as well — to lead the Flyers’ forwards for the next decade is as loud as possible right now.
But Flyers general manager Danny Briere wants to pump the brakes a little bit.
Briere wants Flyers’ young forwards to keep grinding
In a recent exclusive interview Briere had with RG, he was extremely honest about key parts of the Flyers’ rebuild and more specifically this group of young players. He doesn’t want them to think that they have achieved most of their goals already.
“My worry becomes that after the success that a guy like Porter had last year late in the season and into the playoffs –– and I could say the same about Barkey or Bump, those guys really gave us a jolt when they came up late in the year –– you worry that they think that they’ve made it or they think it’s going to be easy, but realistically, the hardest part of the work is is still ahead of them,” Briere said.
“I understand that the expectations are going upwards, but you worry about them kind of going through a similar transition that Matvei had to go through in his second season. You hope that it doesn’t happen, but you never know.”
It’s understandable that Briere doesn’t want these young players to get ahead of themselves. Martone was easily one of the Flyers’ best forwards during the nine regular season games he played before eventually co-leading the team in points during the playoffs. And then Barkey has been so good that his call-up that was originally supposed to be just for a week or so, stretched through the entire second half of the season; all in his first year of pro hockey. Alex Bump looked outstanding and a top-end scoring threat on the Flyers, too.
That level of immediate success can burrow its little tendrils into those young players’ minds and if they don’t continue that same trajectory, then maybe they could spin out and take as much as a year or two to regain their footing as very good NHLers. That is of course a nightmare scenario but maybe Briere is speaking from experience since he never really became what he was as a player until he was 24 years old and over 100 NHL games played in previous seasons.
Now is clearly not the time to take their foot off the gas and to assume that they are instantly going to take back the same role they had on this team when the last season ended. And speaking of that, Briere also touched on Michkov and his need to have a “bounce-back season”.
“It’s pretty funny, when we talk about Matvei having a bounce-back season, he still had 20 goals and 50-plus points [in 2025-26]. But that’s how much he’s seen as a guy that can be a difference-maker, which is really exciting,” Briere said.
“He’s learned some lessons along the way. The second season is never easy. I went through it myself; a lot of players have gone through it before. As long as you learn along the way, that’s how you’re going to keep climbing, that’s how you’re going to get better.”
That’s really all Briere, the Flyers, and fans can hope for. Michkov has learned to not (reportedly) waste a summer in these crucial first seasons of being an NHLer, and he takes those lessons learned and turns it into a stellar campaign where he finds himself regularly in this team’s top six and is leaned on heavier to be the all-world offensive talent we know he is.
Briere touches on Leo Carlsson offer sheet aftermath
In the interview, Briere also managed to talk about the biggest thing to happen to the Flyers and the NHL this summer: The Leo Carlsson offer sheet.
Basically, the Flyers general manager wanted to remind the world that Leo Carlsson did in fact choose Philadelphia out of all the other options presented to him. A record-breaking $18-million AAV certainly helped, but he wanted to be a Flyer since he put his signature on the dotted line.
But now, after more and more players around the league are stepping over each other to be the next-highest paid player in the league and getting millions and millions more than anyone assumed just a few months ago, fingers are being pointed to Briere. Since now it seems like the floodgates have truly opened after a team was willing to give a 21-year-old center $18 million per year.
Briere says not so fast. The offer sheet didn’t really have as big an effect as people are thinking when it comes to contracts signed since then.
“The way I see it is, to me, it didn’t change anything. That’s where it was going all along. Obviously, there are people that like to take the easy approach and just blame the Flyers for that. That’s a very simplistic approach. I don’t have a problem with it; we’re totally fine with that if that’s what they want to believe. But we all know, with the cap going up, what the agents work with now is the percentage of the cap,” Briere said.
“You can go back, and the percentages are very similar to what they were for years. It’s just that now, the cap has increased tremendously, and quickly, the last couple years. Someone’s going to get that money somewhere. It was just a matter of time. Honestly, I don’t think some of the players that signed the big tickets would have signed for less even without the offer sheet. So, no, I don’t believe it played much of a factor [in the market].”
It is true. It’s not like Carlsson managed to actually go to the maximum salary. He did sign for a cap percentage that is in line with some of the biggest deals in league history, such as Sidney Crosby’s and Alex Ovechkin’s first contracts after their rookie deals, so shave off a couple of percentage points with the context of it being an offer sheet for a 21-year-old, and it seems pretty normal. It was just the dollar amount that felt a little crazy — but as we see now, it was just the first of what the new norm was going to be.
