The Flyers certainly made some noise in the second round of last year’s draft, making a whopping four selections and leaning heavily into a particular archetype of player in that range, snapping up a group which collectively brings a good amount of size and energy, but also largely offered their fair share of promise of contributions on the offensive side as well. The Flyers got away with their handful of lottery tickets, and while each in that group would remain to some degree a longer term project, there was some optimism that they would see some initial returns on them coming to fruition in this past season.
A versatile forward with a productive motor coming out of the National Team Development Program, Jack Murtagh jumped into a Boston University program, a perennial contender, for a rookie season which began with heaps of promise laid out before him, but which quickly began to break down on him. Despite all of the interesting and potentially productive pieces that the Terriers had to work with on that roster, the mix never quite came together for them, and they struggled through much of that season. And Murtagh, often shuffled down into a depth role, showed some flashes but ultimately struggled to live up to his individual potential and drive the results that he and team alike were hoping to see.
“It was a little bit inconsistent,” he said of his season, in reflection at last month’s Flyers Development Camp, “It was a little bit rocky throughout the year. A lot of learning experiences [from] playing against older guys, stronger, faster. So I think just moving forward [the goal is] having more of a consistent mindset and a positive year.”
Despite all of the challenges outside of his control that were working against him throughout last season, it remained a bit of a wakeup call for Murtagh, in terms of the difficulty of the competition he would be facing, and the level of attention to detail and the consistency that would be required of him to hold his own against it. All the same, those struggles were informative, and have left him with a clear roadmap to more consistent success in this next season, when he has the chance of grabbing an even greater role.
“I think [the key is]” he said, “just like knowing each game is worth every second of it. Like you can’t take a shift off, you can’t take a period off. Every every single moment in the game is more important than the [last] one. That gets talked about a lot too… I think it’s just because from the experiences this year, like I got dropped in the lineup, or spots taken, or like this past summer about a year ago I didn’t make the national program World Junior team. So it’s like, there’s moments throughout each each time and place where it’s like you always got to give the extra inch.”
Murtagh enters this next season with more than a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. Falling short of his expectations for his rookie season — and missing out on a coveted spot on the World Junior squad — clearly weighs heavily on him, but as he turns the page into this next new season, he’s working well to not be bogged down by that disappointment, and rather, channeling that energy into something productive, and leaning on the lessons from his coaching staff at BU to guide him to the next level in his game.
“[I] definitely struggled at the beginning of the year,” he concluded, “and I think over time, realizing that [our coach] kind of, he kind of gets on guys, which is good and I think that’s great feedback, and he he does a great job teaching [the] positional stuff and going forward it’s something that I’ll still be working on this year and down down the road… I think just the small details, that was something that I touched on a lot this year with my coach, Coach Pandolfo. Just the small details and habits, always being consistent, no matter whether it’s a simple check or a dump, whatever it may be, everything’s just got to be simplified and consistent.”
The jump from the USHL and NTDP to the college level isn’t often a seamless one for young prospects — particularly with how the level of competition in the former has waned over these last few years — and while Murtagh’s struggles to find his footing were a bit of a disappointment, they were hardly a tremendous surprise, nor a major setback or some indictment of his game and its projection. There’s a long road ahead of him to continue to build his game towards something closer to pro-ready, and this season will be about taking that first step forward, in whatever form that may be.
