We’re just about closing out our introductory work, and the unveiling of the first name on our Top 25 Under 25 ranking is right around the corner. But before we hit that mark, there’s one more step back to take, and a handful of players left to recognize — those who still got some love on a smattering of rankings, but didn’t gather up quite enough steam to crack the final ranking, in the end. Better luck next time.
Devin Kaplan
With one 25th place vote, Kaplan still has a fan among the staff rankers (looking at you, Thomas), but his stock has been dropping over the last few iterations of this ranking. There’s still plenty of reason for optimism that he might turn it around in his second pro season with the Phantoms — the staff down there has done some good work with prospects elsewhere in their lineup — and if he does, there is also a lot of reason to be a fan of what could be Kaplan’s complete game, with the combination of size, physicality, and nose for the net that he brings. He’s shown some exciting flashes, to be sure, but it’s been a slower coming together of his complete game. He’ll have a bit more runway to do it this season, and we’ll see what he’s able to do with that opportunity.
Ilya Pautov
Pautov is an easy player to root for — a late pick for the Flyers in 2024 (173rd overall), he brought some immediate scoring flash in his jump back into game action after the draft, but has largely struggled to find consistency in his stints over the whole of these last two seasons. Still, there’s a player here with potentially quite dynamic offensive tools, and he’s the type of player who, if he does pull it all together to turn himself into a productive contributor in the North American game, can add some extra shine to that draft class. Still, there’s a ways for him to go before he gets to that point, but the hope is that a potential move over to the QMJHL could be the shift he needs to get this thing back on track.
Martin Psohlavec
Also just missing the cut is the first of the Flyers’ two goalies drafted this year in Psohlavec. With a solid — if still a little raw visually and fundamentally — draft season behind him and a intriguing resume in the making, Psohlavec could well be a very good add to a goalie pipeline which had otherwise been growing quite thin. There are still a lot of question marks about his game and his trajectory, but his scoring so high on a number of these rankings given how much of an unknown he still is really does speak to the value he brings purely from a positional standpoint. That is, the Flyers have quite desperately needed to add some goaltending depth to their pipeline, and Psohlavec is their best shot at ushering in this next wave of talent.
Helge Grans
A longer standing resident on this ballot, Grans is another player whose stock broadly has been on something of a downswing. He’s coming off of a solid enough season on the whole, but surely much of the perhaps souring sentiment surrounding him at the moment is being driven by his poor showing back in the last training camp (when he lost himself what was all but a shoo-in place on the Flyers’ opening night roster).
Grans still has some fans around here — he hung around on three of the nine staff rankings — likely driven by the fact that he has shown that he can be a serviceable stopgap player in an NHL defense group, but as others here have passed him on the organizational depth chart, he’s in a bit of a precipitous place.
Noah Powell
After something of an underwhelming return to college hockey this past season — in which Powell produced seven goals and 12 points across 34 games with a middling Arizona State program — Powell was signed to his entry level deal and made the jump to the pros in a 16 game stint with the Phantoms to close out their season. It’s been a bit of an up and down journey to get to this point, and the Flyers are betting on the fact that once they get him under more direct internal supervision, and get him some more work in with the development staff, that he can really begin to blossom and start working himself back up closer to his full potential.
There might well still be some interesting upside here, but he falls on this ranking below some higher upside players, or else some more known commodities.
Matthew Gard
Though he hasn’t gotten quite the same amount of fanfare as some other members of that large group of players drafted by the Flyers in the first two rounds in 2025, Gard had himself an under the radar quite solid season. It was a bit uneven, with a slow start to his season, but he really was able to kick things into high gear after being traded to Seattle about halfway through his season, closing things out with a modest 23 points over his 32 games played with his new squad.
There’s still a lot of room for growth in his game as well, but he’s continuing to put it together, and adds a bit more good depth in their pipeline at the center position, even if it hasn’t been as flashy as others in this group.
Carter Amico
Speaking of that 2025 early draft class, we come to Carter Amico, who had himself quite a strange season. After working his way back from injury — which had kept him out for close to a whole year — Amico was set to get rolling and jump into college hockey, but that proved to be something of a false start. Amico’s playing time at Boston University was very limited, and ultimately the decision was made to have him move back to the USHL for the second half of the season, before returning to BU in the fall. In Muskegon, Amico started to find his game again, but it was a long process to get himself back up to speed and to prove to himself that his body could hold up after the injury. There was some critical development time missed, and he might have fallen a bit behind the curve, but with his age, there’s still plenty of time ahead of him to catch back up.
Still, despite all of the strangeness and setbacks in his career over these last couple of years, Amico remains a player who, if he pans out, will be an exciting one to watch, and a valuable one to the organization, as his size and physical play can offer an effective balance to some of the smaller puck movers elsewhere in the lineup, and it’s easy to see why he landed just a stone’s throw outside of this year’s top of the ranking.
Aleksei Kolosov
The last of our honorable mentions (and a very narrow miss of the final list), Aleksei Kolosov is still a divisive player, and quite a complicated case.
On the one hand, all of the drama from his questionable desire to develop in the minors surely still weighs heavily on the minds of many, as does the fact that his last start with the Flyers ended with him putting up a literal zero save percentage before being pulled from the game, casting real doubts on his ability to hang at the NHL level, after all.
On the other hand, though, Kolosov showed greater commitment in his time with the Phantoms this season, and they got a lot of quite good results from him as a result, just as he made some real improvements in his game, and that’s worth recognizing as well.
But favor is a hard thing to get back once it’s lost, and that’s something we’re seeing quite clearly in a number of these rankings.
