Is it time for Flyers to be concerned about Travis Konecny?

So far this season, the Philadelphia Flyers have scored 31 goals in 12 games, good for 2.58 goals per game and 26th in the league. The offense has been extremely difficult to come by, and it’s not like the Flyers are merely snake-bitten. Simply, they aren’t generating enough offensive pressure and shots to be considered snake-bitten, and in the early goings a ton of the blame has been placed upon sophomore-season Matvei Michkov.

One guy that’s flown pretty under the radar for his middling performances through 12 games? Top-line winger Travis Konecny, who’s in the first season of an eight-year contract extension with $8.5 million in average annual value. So far in 2025-26, Konecny has registered four goals and four assists through 12 games. In a vacuum, eight points isn’t a horrendous start to the season, but if he continues at this pace, that’s a 55-point pace over an 82 game season. You can probably assume that the two-time all star will pick up the pace a bit, considering Konecny’s tendency to have these cold stretches every year.

However, should we actually assume that 2025-26 Konecny is going to snap out of this?

Maybe the veteran should get the benefit of the doubt, but Konecny hasn’t been this cold in quite some time, especially in terms of underlying statistics. So, let’s dive into the concerning trends in Konecny’s statistical profile, and what it could mean moving forward for the organization.

What’s happening from a statistical standpoint

Travis Konecny has never really been an underlying stats darling, outside of Konecny’s two season stretch from 2019 to 2021 where the Flyers registered 54.9 percent of the shot attempts with Konecny on the ice at 5-on-5. In 2023-24, the year before Konecny signed his extension, the Flyers sat at 55.6 percent of the shot attempts with Konecny on the ice. Listed below from best to worst, here is every season of the Flyers shot-attempts-for percentages with Konecny on the ice, according to Natural Stat Trick.

Season CF% 2023-24 55.60 2020-21 55.26 2019-20 54.77 2018-19 50.32 2016-17 50.30 2021-22 49.75 2022-23 49.36 2017-18 48.86 2024-25 48.10 2025-26 (12 games) 46.81

In aggregate, the last 94 games of Travis Konecny’s career have been his worst from a playdriving standpoint. For the argument’s purpose, let’s separate Konecny’s play since February 2025 from the season he had from October to January (58 points in 53 games). From February on last year, Konecny put up 18 points in 29 games, cratering in terms of a point production standpoint.

When you peel back the curtain on Konecny’s play-driving numbers since February 1st, he’s put up a 44.9 percent shots-attempted share, and a 46.07% expected-goals percentage over his last 41 games. Outside of fourth liner Garnet Hathaway, those are the worst play-driving statistics among forwards on the team in that timespan. No matter how you shake it, Konecny’s been pretty rough over a half a season’s worth of games now. Even though the sample is discontinuous, we’re looking at an extended run of a pretty bad version of Konecny, and one that’s really a cause for concern moving forward.

It’s not merely expected goals or shots-attempts where Konecny has fallen off a cliff in the last couple of seasons. According to Micah Blake McCurdy’s model of “synthetic goals”, which attempts to quantify all the ways a player helps or hurts his team into a single metric, Konecny’s play has dipped to below-average 3rd liner value. From his highs as an elite first line winger at ages 25 and 26, you can see below that Konecny’s value has tanked, at least by this model.

From hockeyviz.com

What it means moving forward

Since the Flyers signed Konecny to an extension, the decision has been the subject of tons of debate on whether it was the right move for a rebuilding team to make. Like it or not, the Flyers believed Konecny was essential to the culture, and would age gracefully enough to be an effective player into his mid-thirties. If the underlying statistics of the last 50 or so games hold, though, that second assumption is in real jeopardy.

Which brings us to the conversation of the roster puzzle, and who will be here on the next great Flyers team. Here’s a list of contenders for spots on the wing in the coming years: Matvei Michkov, Travis Konecny, Tyson Foerster, Owen Tippett, Bobby Brink, Alex Bump, Denver Barkey, Porter Martone, Nikita Grebenkin.

That’s nine wingers for six spots in an NHL top-nine, and one more winger than is necessary to fill out an entire lineup of 8 wingers. Definitively, multiple of these players will be moved out in the next few seasons as Danny Briere and Keith Jones plan out this roster. The long-term extension of Konecny, though, makes it darn near impossible that he\'s a viable candidate to be shipped out of here, even if things go south with his play.

It’s already a roster crunch, but what makes it even worse? The deployment of Trevor Zegras as a wing, and him proving to be a darn good fit on this team so far. We should obviously give Konecny time to pick up the pace, and Zegras time to potentially regress, but does Konecny’s long-term contract make an extension of Zegras more difficult, in the case that Zegras is a pure wing?

If the highest potential of Zegras is truly on the wing, the Flyers have a real roster crunch on their hands in the top-6, especially once Porter Martone arrives. That roster crunch is only exacerbated by an aging veteran that isn’t producing a whole lot, and really calls into question why exactly the Flyers re-signed Konecny. At least one or two of the guys listed above are going to have to go, and the Flyers chose to staple themselves to Konecny for the foreseeable future. If what we’ve seen in the last 41 games holds, that means one of the most ineffective players on that list of potential wingers will remain, and a player that the team would really want to keep is likely gone.

Again, there’s lots of time for Konecny to get it going again, but the impending roster crunch is well on its way to becoming a problem.

Talking Points