Welcome to the Philadelphia Flyers Top 25 Under 25 ranking, Winter 2026 edition. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be putting out our ranking of the, well, top 25 players in the Flyers organization who are under 25 years old. A total of 13 writers at Broad Street Hockey submitted ballots and here is the consensus ranking.
We’re still chugging along! In the middle of the ranking now, we’re seeing Flyers prospects that truly could make an impact in the NHL in a few years — or some players that we foolishly believed in a little too much and they’re going to be playing pro in Europe by the time they’re 27 years old.
16) Carson Bjarnason
Primary Team: Lehigh Valley Phantoms, AHL
2025-26 Stats: .889 SV%, 3.08 GAA in 22 GP
Rank in Summer 25 Under 25: 16
Age: 20
Acquired: 2nd-round pick (51st overall) in 2023 NHL Draft
Maddie (Ranked #12): It’s been a bit of a weird season for Bjarnason, but on the whole I’ve been really impressed by the work he’s done with the Phantoms so far this year. It was a big step up in level of competition for him, but he settled in almost surprisingly quickly. He’s had a few rough games in there – and recently it’s looked a bit like he’s beginning to wear down from how much he had to be used when Kolosov was up with the Flyers – but his play on the whole has been nicely controlled. Given the importance of the position, he’s definitely not a player I’d push for rushing into an NHL job, but his work so far has me feeling reasonably confident that he’ll be competing for that job before too long.
Joe (Ranked #17): While he may be the less exciting goalie prospect in the Flyers’ system, Bjarnason still has a lot of potential–but he was always going to be a development project. The raw tools are there, even if the box scores don’t leap out at you. Goalies take so long to develop (Bjarnason is only 20 years old!), so his pro ceiling is still something of a mystery; that’s why I can’t rank him much higher, but as Maddie said: he’s doing well with the Phantoms, so he’s up from where I had him ranked over the summer at 22. I’d be surprised to see him getting NHL games next season, barring catastrophic goaltending injuries to the Flyers, but we say it all the time: goalies are weird! Maybe it clicks and he figures things out sooner.
Thomas (Ranked #16): This year was massive for Bjarnason and while the numbers don’t pop off the page, he has shown enough improvement to keep his stock level. Him winding up exactly where we had him in the summer is a true sign of just how we’re still thinking about him as a very good prospect, but isn’t the best young netminder in the AHL, or something like that. Bjarnason is a mechanically solid goalie who will surely develop well and is someone to at least keep an eye on for the next few years as the Flyers’ crease starts to settle in.
15) Jack Berglund
Primary Team: Farjestad BK, SHL
2025-26 Stats: 4 G, 7 Pts in 31 GP
Rank in Summer 25 Under 25: 20
Age:
Acquired: 2nd-round pick (51st overall) in 2024 NHL Draft
Maddie (Ranked #15): I’ve been a bit of a Berglund skeptic since the pick was made, but I’m starting to come around on him. He obviously had that huge World Junior showing which I think earned him a lot of positive favor in a number of online spaces, but he’s been showing a nice bit of incremental progress in his development across the board. The work he’s done at the U20 level in Sweden has been excellent, but the next step is for him to really stick around and carve out a role for himself in the SHL. That’s still been a bit of a process – the points aren’t really coming for him but he’s been getting some increased usage finally, which has been nice to see – but he’s been steadily chipping away at it, and that’s exactly what you want to see.
Joe (Ranked #12): Boy, was this pick panned in the moment–especially because the Flyers traded up to select Berglund. Two years on and some of us may have a bit of crow to eat, as Berglund’s only slowly and steadily improved. The ceiling still isn’t super high, but there’s now a reasonable path to playing in the NHL that I wasn’t sure existed a couple summers ago. Berglund excels in international competition against his age group, captaining Sweden to Gold this year and tying draft-eligible phenom Ivar Stenberg for the team lead in points with 10. However, Berglund hasn’t put it all together in the SHL–but if we’re to believe the past is prologue, he seems like the sort of player to figure it out.
Thomas (Ranked #13): I don’t have much to add to what Maddie said but it really was the World Juniors for me that made me think of him more than just a future depth forward that will always get more chances than he really deserves because He Is Large. And as pointed out, he was regularly getting bottom-six minutes for Farjestad before he was able to step up at the Under-20 tournament and since his return, has been logging closer to 17, 18, sometimes even 20 minutes in a game. Now, he has just two points in the nine games post-World Juniors but his entire team has managed to score just 11 goals — so what do you really expect? He’s someone that will get a whole lot of attention from the Flyers’ development staff and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here.
14) Jack Nesbitt
Primary Team: Windsor Spitfires, OHL
2025-26 Stats: 17 G, 42 Pts in 43 GP
Rank in Summer 25 Under 25: 14
Age: 19
Acquired: 1st-round pick (12th overall) in 2025 NHL Draft
Maddie (Ranked #19): It looks like I was the lowest ranker on Nesbitt, which probably does convey my complicated feelings about him. He’s having himself a pretty good season with Windsor, and he certainly gets a bit of a bump because of how long he was able to hang around in camp this fall, and if he does grow into a player close to his ceiling, there’s absolutely a ton of value in a centerman with some size who can also score. But, that said, Nesbitt is still very much a project and quite far away from hitting on the projection the Flyers have for him, so he’s still kind of hanging out in the lower “wait and see” tier of my ranking.
Joe (Ranked #11): I was the resident Nesbitt hater when the Flyers made that draft pick, and my stance hasn’t changed much–so why did I give him the second highest ranking of all the writers? Because a major criteria for me when it comes to the Flyers’ top picks is “they better be right,” and perhaps no prospect in the system–not even Jett Luchanko–better embodies that than Nesbitt. It’s less about who they selected him over (though Jackson Smith’s looking legit) and more about what they gave up at picks 22 and 31. Nesbitt’s having a fine season, and the Flyers have a solid track record of picking mediocre skaters (think Tyson Foerster and Bobby Brink) and turning them into, at minimum, NHL average skaters, the belief being skating comes around with physical maturity and strength. If the skating improves for Nesbitt, it’s easier to see the second-line center potential–but it is quite a leap to make at the moment, and Nesbitt’s got a long way to go before he’s ready for the NHL. The Flyers better be right about him.
Maddie: That’s interesting, the “they better be right” factor, that’s a new wrinkle to the ranking process that I don’t think I’ve seen used here before. I’m curious how much the organization’s estimation/projection of the player feeds into your own evaluation?
Joe: It’s more about how the Flyers’ player evaluations align with consensus: are they really smarter than everybody else, trading up to pick a player whose predicted draft spot was all over the board? Are they that confident in their scouting that it was the best use of the assets they’d acquired? They’ve more or less said Nesbitt will be a project, and they’ve preached patience with the rebuild, so I’m willing to give the player plenty of time to live up to the draft pedigree—but in the few short months since the draft, that gap between the Flyers’ valuation and consensus hasn’t shrunk much. They can say they believe he has 2C potential, but I don’t see it yet. If this competitive rebuild is going to work, they need to nail the early picks they do have, add that high-end talent we so often talk about, and have fans trust that they can identify that talent. Confidence in your internal staff is good, but we on the outside don’t have that implicit trust; the “they better be right” factor is the front office earning that trust by proving that, in the long run, they made the correct draft decisions to advance the rebuild, even if they seemed odd to the larger public at the time. All we can do is wait to be proven one way or the other, though, and nobody likes waiting!
Maddie: Huh. Well, to each their own! Anyway!
Thomas (Ranked #15): Okay, well, my reasoning isn’t so much as to what the Flyers think, but I haven’t seen much from Nesbitt other than a little bit of underperformance. He isn’t a driver in Windsor and his skating, while improving, has to come so much further for him to reach the pro level. While before the season, I was envisioning Nesbitt being one of the 19-year-olds that go to the AHL once the new rule for CHL players takes place next season, now I’m thinking he might just stay in the OHL (or go do a mid-level NCAA program) for his Draft+2 season. I still had him ranked this high because of his hockey sense and possibility to see more, but I’m not a strong believer in him battling up as a bona fide middle-six center in a few years.
