It’s been a relatively quiet week for the Flyers up to this point, but just as it was beginning to feel a little bit too quiet around here, the Flyers dropped a little bit of news on us, down to the wire before they rolling for tonight’s game in Nashville. Ahead of tonight’s game against the Predators, the Flyers announced that they’ve activated goaltender Samuel Ersson from IR, and loaned forward Jacob Gaucher back to Lehigh Valley to make room for that.
Transaction: We've activated goaltender Samuel Ersson off injured reserve. In a corresponding roster move, we have loaned forward Jacob Gaucher to the @LVPhantoms (AHL). pic.twitter.com/ByCqCBh8gB
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) November 7, 2025
Ersson’s activation comes exactly a week after he was placed on IR to begin with, and this feels like the best possible news to come out of this. That is, Ersson has dealt with some persistent lower-body injuries over the past couple of years, and that fact that he was struck down with another so early in this season did certainly dredge up a good bit of concern, but a quick bounce back this time around did a lot to help ease some of those concerns. This is a datapoint in the larger injury history, but not something we have to get ourselves all worked up about, at least for the time being.
Getting this reassignment done early also — though less critically — allows Gaucher to get back into the mix with the Phantoms for a day of practice and get more comfortably ready to jump right into game action with them for their next game on Saturday night.
Now, the bigger elephant in the room with all of this is the fact that, as Gaucher has gone back down and the Flyers have both of their NHL regular goaltenders back and healthy, Aleksei Kolosov has remained up with the big club a while longer. And if the faint buzz of alarm bells is beginning to kick up, we can understand why. After all, the Flyers spent much of last season trying to roll with a three goalie rotation, and to pretty disastrous results — Kolosov and Fedotov struggled to get going at times in inconsistent usage, and their development suffered for it. It didn’t work, the Flyers knew it didn’t work, and even though they’re carrying three goaltenders at the moment, it’s hard to imagine that this is an experiment they’re going to want to seriously revisit, a situation that they’re going to prolong for a whole lot longer. Kolosov has looked reasonably solid in his time with the Flyers this season, but more reps in the AHL is going to do him better, so it feels like it’s only a matter of time before they get him back there to work on that.
The Flyers will be getting started against the Predators before too long here, and they’ll have Dan Vladar getting the start, and Ersson dressing as the backup. They won’t be throwing him straight into the fire, coming right off the injury, but there’s a chance that we could see him getting a start as soon as Saturday’s matinee against the Senators. We’ll see how this all plays out.
