The Flyers host the Anaheim Ducks play Tuesday night, which means everyone’s favorite guy to hate, Cutter Gauthier, is back in Philadelphia.
As has been much discussed over the last few years, Gauthier was traded out of Philadelphia two years ago for Jamie Drysdale and a 2025 second round selection (Jack Murtagh). In that trade, the Flyers sent a disgruntled Gauthier to Anaheim, losing one of their two best prospects for a defenseman that had struggled in his early showings in the NHL.
Not to mention, losing Gauthier took a potential franchise center out of the organization, as Gauthier was still being touted as a possible centerman at the time of the trade. From then on, the Flyers and Gauthier went on to essentially publicly bash one another, and the rest is history.
During the first Cutter Gauthier game in Philadelphia last season, the boos were out in full force in a 6-0 Flyers win at the (former) Wells Fargo Center. Whatever way you slice it, the animosity between Philadelphia and Gauthier will always be a factor in Flyers-Ducks games. But, considering the emergence of Jamie Drysdale, should we care this much?
So, nearly two years to the day of the Gauthier-Drysdale trade, let’s dive into where the players and teams stand today.
Statistical profiles
It may be apples and oranges to compare a winger in Gauthier to a defenseman in Drysdale, but it’s worth doing when thinking about the significance of both to their respective lineups.
First, with Drysdale, this season has really seen Drysdale blossom into a bona fide top-four defenseman, with projection for even more. According to Natural Stat Trick, Drysdale ranks 24th in all situations Corsi-For percentage among defenseman who’ve played at least 800 minutes this season, at 52.2 percent. In terms of expected goals, Drysdale ranks 14th in the league, as the Flyers carry a 54.07 percent share of the expected goals with Drysdale on the ice. Those numbers slot Drysdale among the elite defensemen in the league, particularly among the really young blueliners in the NHL. Outside of Lane Hutson’s sterling 57.8 percent of the expected goals share for Montreal, Drysdale’s got the highest expected goals for percentage for his age bracket.
By another model – Micah Blake McCurdy’s at HockeyViz.com – Drysdale’s on the precipice of first-pairing level this season. And this is according to HockeyViz’s synthetic goals model that tries to summarize a player’s overall impact in the game and for the first time in his career, Drysdale is well above water and trending in a great direction.
By the eye test, Drysdale has morphed into a dynamic defenseman on the breakout. In Drysdale’s first season and a half with the Flyers, Drysdale’s foot speed felt like something he didn’t quite know how to use correctly all the time. There were flashes, but Drysdale’s decision-making and physical tools often weren’t in exact agreement with one another.
This season, alongside the puck-moving Emil Andrae, Drysdale’s learned how to maximize his skating, and there’s no place that’s more evident than on the breakout. Crisp, quick decisions from Drysdale have become the norm, and he’s evolved into a true weapon with the puck in the defensive and neutral zones.
Late post here but was going through my clips and realized I never post this. Just pure breakout mastery from Jamie Drysdale. Love that you can hear him call for it from Seels as well. He had that play telegraphed in his head.#LetsGoFlyers pic.twitter.com/llaW59gqPV
— Flyers Clips (@Flyers_Clips) October 29, 2025
In addition, Drysdale’s offense is beginning to come around too. He’s currently at three goals and 15 assists, a 37 point pace over a full 82-game season. That’s not an incredible offensive mark for a defenseman. But for a defenseman that’s excelling in the defensive zone and on the breakout like Drysdale is? At 23 years of age, it’s a pretty strong step forward for a player that has struggled mightily in his previous years in the NHL. There’s real hope that there’s more offensive upside in Drysdale (as seen in the play below), and if he can cross the ~50 point threshold in the coming years, there’s a darn good all-around defenseman here.
Sweet slap-pass down low by Jamie Drysdale connecting with Travis Konecny to extend the Flyers lead to 3-1.
— Andrew Coté (@acote_88) December 31, 2025
Goal: Konecny (12) pic.twitter.com/PC986hfsxu
Cutter Gauthier, on the other hand, has quickly become a vital piece of the Ducks core. There’s little question about that, and having a nearly point-per-game season in your first full NHL season is impressive. So far, Gauthier has 19 goals and 19 assists in 41 games, and has a decent chance of scoring 40 goals in a season already. It’s a dramatic improvement from last season for Gauthier, where he put up 44 points in 82 games and finished fifth in Calder voting.
On the left wing of phenom Leo Carlsson and veteran Alex Killorn, Gauthier’s underlying numbers have also been sterling amongst the wider NHL ranks. From Natural Stat Trick, among all forwards who’ve played at least 700 minutes this season, Gauthier ranks 27th in corsi-for percentage (58.74%) and 52nd in expected-goals for (56.56%). Similar to Drysdale, Gauthier’s one of the highest-performing young players on the list, in similar play-driving company as Utah’s Dylan Guenther and Carolina’s Jackson Blake. Especially when Gauthier can back up those kinds of numbers with an elite shot, you’ve got a borderline-elite forward in the making. That bears out in Micah Blake McCurdy’s model for Gauthier, which also slots the 21-year-old at second line level with tons of room to grow.
Let’s think about the alternate reality
From the look of everything, and how badly the Flyers need a 40-goal scorer on the roster, it appears the Flyers have handily lost the Gauthier-Drysdale trade. But that is in a vacuum and obviously not looking at the entire context of why exactly he was dealt and how the young American forward was never going to sign with the Flyers for some unknown reason.
As a thought experiment, let’s imagine the trade never happened, and the Flyers kept Gauthier.
Well, for one, the Flyers probably still don’t have a franchise center. They likely would have tried Gauthier at center, but they would likely have evaluated that Gauthier’s skillset just fits so much better on the wing. So, they’d be stuck with another high-level wing, which is not exactly what the Flyers need right now. Even prior to the Gauthier trade and the 2024 and 2025 drafts, the Flyers cupboards were so full along the wing. Travis Konecny, Matvei Michkov, Tyson Foerster, Owen Tippett, Denver Barkey, Bobby Brink, Alex Bump, etc. were all on the team or in the Flyers system prior to Gauthier’s departure. Add in 2025 lottery pick Porter Martone? The Flyers are absolutely loaded on the wing, and while they may miss someone of Gauthier’s goal-scoring acumen in the lineup, they aren’t exactly hurting for wingers. Sure, the Flyers’ draft strategy may have changed if Gauthier were still here (for example, James Hagens may have been the pick over Martone), but that’s something we’ll never know. Now, the Flyers lost a high-end winger at the position where it’s easiest to find other high-end players, and they look well on their way to doing just that.
On the flipside, imagine Jamie Drysdale still on that Ducks team. Considering how much of a dumpster fire the Ducks were at the time of Drysdale’s departure, it’s kinda of difficult to see how Drysdale would have developed in Anaheim to the point he’s at now in Philadelphia.
Drysdale was thrown into the deep end in his early years in Anaheim, and there’s little chance that would have changed in the pre-Joel Quenneville years with the Ducks. Likely, he would have been passed by Jackson Lacombe, Pavel Mintyukov, and Olen Zellweger, in terms of both on-ice development and organizational priorities. He was already trending in that direction pre-departure, which made him expendable in the Gauthier trade anyways.
Really, the argument here is that the trade very much worked out for both sides. While it’s impossible to fully know, Drysdale was placed in a much more favorable developmental situation in Philadelphia than he was in Anaheim, and the emergence of a bona fide top-four defenseman is arguably more important than another winger for the current Flyers organization. It depends on if you view a top-four, play-driving defenseman or a top-line winger as more valuable in the current landscape of the NHL, but either way you shake it, it’s not a massive difference for the Flyers and Ducks organizations today.
Perhaps, with this in mind, we can finally start to move on from the public debacle that was the Cutter Gauthier trade fallout. Or, at the very least, we can begin to honestly frame it as a win-win trade and the Flyers obtaining an ideal outcome from an untenable situation.
