The Philadelphia Flyers are rebuilding and that is already showing up on the roster when you look down the age column of the lineup they’re going to be putting on the ice for Friday’s season opener.
Wednesday marks the semi-official start to the 2024-25 NHL season. Yes, we had official regular-season games technically take place in Czechia between the New Jersey Devils and the Buffalo Sabres last week, but now all 32 teams are getting in on the action. And before the puck was dropped, the teams officially released their season-opening rosters — putting their cards down on the table and cementing what players will at least start in the NHL.
And with all of that knowledge and information, we can now dissect a little further into the rosters around the league. Namely, we can look at how dang old some of the players are and what the average age of each hockey club is.
Well, it turns out that our Flyers are heading into the 2024-25 season with the fifth-youngest roster in the league. Thanks to our friends at NHLtoSeattle, we can see the distribution of ages on each roster and specifically for the Flyers.
And people say this team isn’t in the middle of a rebuild.
The Flyers have an average age of 26.58 years old on their 23-man roster. The four other teams who have a lower average age are the Columbus Blue Jackets (26.54), the Utah Hockey Club (26.45), the Montreal Canadiens (25.48), and the Buffalo Sabres (24.96). And maybe the best part is, is the fact that the Flyers could technically be even younger than that if they were to consider active players other than the entire roster.
As we can see on the age distribution chart, defensemen Erik Johnson and Ryan Ellis, and forward Nic Deslauriers are the three oldest players in Philadelphia. Two of them do not have a regular spot in the lineup and the other one is most likely never playing professional hockey again. We are lazy over here, so we will not do the exact math of their age to the day and then take it away from the average — if someone does, feel free to leave it in the comments — but we know that with those three gone, the average age will drop significantly enough to maybe get into the top three.
But we can do that with other teams too — Utah would get younger without Robert Bortuzzo, for example — so it’s a little bit more complicated. We can say that no other team have clear frontrunners who do not have a spot in the lineup barring injuries, so there’s that.
While other teams are praying on draft picks to pan out, or veterans to play well enough to be traded, the Flyers seem to already be a couple steps ahead of the tear-it-all-down rebuilding crowd with talented, young players in the NHL.
