After putting together a strong showing with most of their projected opening night roster assembled against the Bruins on Thursday night, the Flyers are keeping the pace up through this very abbreviated preseason run towards opening night. With just one more exhibition game on the schedule, the Flyers announced Friday afternoon that they’ve made what will presumably be effectively their final, more formal, round of cuts, and have assigned forwards Cole Knuble, Jacob Gaucher, and Jett Luchanko, along with defenseman Oliver Bonk to the AHL.
Transactions: We have reduced our training camp roster by four players.
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) September 25, 2026
These four will likely not make it to Lehigh Valley in time to join in with the Phantoms’ own preseason opener on Friday evening, but that still gets them back to get into the mix for the final two of their exhibition tune ups on Saturday and Tuesday.
Development wins out
While we’ve spent a good deal of time around here praising the work that each of those four players have done in the preseason to showcase their games and keep themselves on the radar of the management group and still quite firmly in those battles for roster spots, and we still give them a lot of credit for that work done, but the fact remains that this is a group of young, developing players, and it seems the Flyers have found it best to avoid kicking the can of the inevitable too far down the road, deciding for now that what’s best for all of these players is to get right back into the mix with the Phantoms, rather than sitting around in a platoon on the NHL roster, and to just jump right back into their work with the AHL and development staff to polish out their games and get them ready for when an opportunity calls — and it will call, for most of this group — for a full-time graduation to the NHL.
For a player like Knuble in particular, it’s a bit of a tough blow. He’s been one of the biggest standouts through this run of preseason games, and Rick Tocchet even acknowledged as recently as Thursday night that Knuble was legitimately putting some pressure on more established players in the training camp mix. He delivered his game at the highest level, and there’s truly nothing more that one could have hoped to see from him in that setting, and he can head back down to join the Phantoms with a lot to be proud of. Ultimately, though, the writing on the wall is that the Flyers will soon be healthy enough where his presence wouldn’t be hugely needed, and the broader point made that he’ll be better off in the long run moving down to the AHL for now, taking on what’s sure to be a very big role with them to start the season, and learning his lessons, building his game, and keeping himself ready to be the first call when the Flyers do inevitably need to make one. It’s a bit of disappointment to start the season for him, to be sure, but there’s a lot to be excited about in his game and his projection, based on what he was able to show already against NHL competition. His time will come before too long.
Approaching the final looks
With these last cuts, the Flyers’ roster sits a 26 players, with the last extras hanging around being just Carl Grundstrom (who cleared waivers on Thursday but hasn’t yet been assigned to Lehigh Valley), Garrett Wilson (not on an NHL contract and will surely be back on his way down before too long as well) David Jiricek, Helge Grans (who was injured in Thursday’s game), and Aleksei Kolosov. This leaves the Flyers with a little bit of extra insulation on their roster at the forward and goaltender positions, in case either of Denver Barkey or Dan Vladar aren’t healthy enough to go for Game 1 next Wednesday, and also brings them into the season with the last open competition being between Jiricek and Simon Benoit for the lineup spot as the Flyers’ sixth defenseman.
These are all of the big bits of business decided, it would seem, and leaves the Flyers ready to use Saturday’s game as the closest thing possible to a dress rehearsal for their season opener. We’ll see soon what they’re able to do with that.
