There have been several questions thrown around throughout Philadelphia Flyers training camp and we got the answer for most. The blue line is what it’s going to be and no young defenseman truly stepped up to take complete control of the opportunity with Rasmus Ristolainen’s absence to start the season. The goaltending has been good and we could at least see an adequate tandem in Philadelphia. Oh, and Matvei Michkov is going to ruin the lives of dozens of defensemen this season.
But beyond that, the major talking point has been whether or not center Jett Luchanko has played well enough to truly earn the chance to start his season with the Flyers. Famously, Luchanko was able to breakthrough and appear in four games throughout the first couple weeks of the NHL season last year. He demonstrated his ability to potentially be a top-end transition center with his speed, and have his stick work throughout all three zones be effective enough, but there was no pop. No true offensive juice was coming from his stick and that’s why he wasn’t able to be the ultimate surprise and play an entire season in the NHL at 18 years old.
Now, he’s been sort of doing the same thing one year later. So, again, we’re asking the same question and seeing if the decision should just be made even before the Flyers start their season on October 9 — to just send Luchanko down to the OHL’s Guelph Storm and for him to play out his final year of junior hockey.
It wouldn’t be a step back or anything. Luchanko has shown that he is capable of playing in the NHL and can live and exist as an NHL centerman, but that’s not really something as an end goal. Sure, if he stayed with the Flyers for the entire season as a bottom-six center, there could be some moments of development. We could hypothetically see some progress from Luchanko and he would finish the season with maybe eight goals and 20 assists while averaging 12 minutes a night. Sure, that’s a player. But do you want your first-round pick that you believe in so much, to have that experience at 19 years old? An age where some players are just starting to play college hockey, or even just get to a level where they can flourish offensively? Probably not.
Luchanko should simply just start his season down in Guelph and ride it out. There is no shame in playing the Draft+2 season as a first-round pick. It’s been done plenty of times before. And, well, actually let’s just look at the top points-per-game earners among OHL forwards who were taken in the first round for their Draft+2 season, since 2010.
| PLAYER | SEASON | GP | GOALS | POINTS | POINTS PER GAME |
| Dylan Strome | 2016-17 | 35 | 22 | 75 | 2.14 |
| Morgan Frost | 2018-19 | 58 | 37 | 109 | 1.88 |
| Max Domi | 2014-15 | 57 | 32 | 102 | 1.79 |
| Quentin Musty | 2024-25 | 33 | 30 | 59 | 1.79 |
| Ryan Strome | 2012-13 | 53 | 34 | 94 | 1.77 |
| Mark Scheifele | 2012-13 | 45 | 39 | 79 | 1.76 |
| Scott Laughton | 2013-14 | 54 | 40 | 87 | 1.61 |
| Nick Suzuki | 2018-19 | 59 | 34 | 94 | 1.59 |
| Tanner Pearson | 2011-12 | 60 | 37 | 91 | 1.52 |
| Liam Foudy | 2019-20 | 45 | 28 | 68 | 1.51 |
| Easton Cowan | 2024-25 | 46 | 29 | 69 | 1.50 |
| Logan Brown | 2017-18 | 32 | 22 | 48 | 1.50 |
| Ty Dellandrea | 2019-20 | 47 | 32 | 70 | 1.49 |
| Calum Ritchie | 2024-25 | 47 | 15 | 70 | 1.49 |
| Zack Kassian | 2010-11 | 56 | 26 | 77 | 1.38 |
| Owen Tippett | 2018-19 | 54 | 33 | 74 | 1.37 |
There are some Names on that lengthy list, but the general takeaway should be that it’s not so uncommon for a first-round pick forward to go back for another year. It will only become less common with now the option to go play in the NCAA or be the one 19-year-old that NHL teams are allowed to send to the AHL starting in the 2026-27 season, but in the OHL-or-NHL era, we saw plenty of high-level forwards go back to junior hockey.
A more specific takeaway should be that this doesn’t limit Luchanko’s ceiling whatsoever. There are players who are (or should be) top-six forwards on this list, or at the very least very solid contributors to their team in the future. Sure, it would be great if Luchanko scored at a high level and turned into Mark Scheifele or Nick Suzuki we would be overjoyed. But looking at the total scope of the very top producers for this age and while it’s a variety of outcomes. There are those top-end centers but also players who completely flamed out, or are just basic top-nine players on mediocre teams.
But Luchanko is different.
Luchanko is atypical from the returning OHL player
The main reason why this is such a debate is something we already mentioned: Luchanko can survive in the NHL. Unlike other 19-year-olds (and the majority of the players on the list above), the Flyers prospect has tools like top-end hockey sense and defensive work already. Frankly, Luchanko already cares so much about playing in all three zones and we know that someone like Morgan Frost had to work on that. He’s already a step above the former Flyers center was in so many ways that actually contribute to winning hockey games.
For the other top players on that list — Dylan Strome, Max Domi, Easton Cowan, Ryan Strome, and the like — the reason they were sent back was because they didn’t have a complete enough game to stay afloat in the NHL. They would just get swallowed up and needed to go back to the OHL to just grow stronger with the puck and learn how to actually backcheck. Even if it was somewhat a waste of a season for some players, like Strome who was able to put up several points a night like it was nothing, it was the only option they could have without setting them back.
Luchanko already has the high-pace motor, the defensive ability, and the impeccable transition game that you don’t normally see a prospect even come close to developing until after they finish junior hockey and have a couple more seasons playing pro. He’s already there. It’s the offensive side of the game that he needs to work on. All the scoring that we do typically see in those top-end prospects like a Max Domi, who was able to score with ease in juniors and was able to develop the nose to the net, the offensive awareness, and everything else that made him a successful scorer.
That is what Luchanko needs to work on. All of these other prospects grew up with being able to dangle their way through minor hockey and be The Player on their teams. Luchanko was not. Even in minor hockey, he didn’t lead the team in scoring like he has already with the Storm.
There is a foundation laid with his game that is unlike most other prospects and what is typically built on top of it, is something that the score-heavy prospects already have but they’re without that stable foundation.
And if we are worried about Luchanko being yet another “Ty Dellandrea” on this list, we already know that he projects to be a better player than Dellandrea ever was as a prospect. And the other relative failures there are other reasons why they didn’t succeed. Logan Brown was slow and big, Liam Foudy just scored on a good London Knights team, and injuries derailed Tanner Pearson’s career. Every other player was at least a solid contributor in the NHL or is still a prospect.
Of course, that’s a list of the most productive Draft+2 forwards who were selected in the first round. We hope, if Luchanko is sent back to Guelph, that he finishes on that list by season’s end. That’s the goal and it’s fairly achievable.
Guelph is no longer that “bad team”
One of the major talking points for anyone that wants Luchanko to stay with the Flyers is the thought that him heading back to the Guelph Storm wouldn’t even get his offense going because it is such a poor scoring environment. Well, that might have been the case in previous seasons but it isn’t anymore.
For the 2025-26 season, the Storm added some veterans and kept a whole lot of players around. Their main acquisition this summer was getting overage forward Ethan Miedema from the Kingston Frontenacs. The 20-year-old former fourth-round pick of the Buffalo Sabres already leads the Storm in scoring with five points through the first four games and should easily be in contention to be Luchanko’s wing if he returns to Guelph.
And even then, the Storm kept solid defenseman prospect Quinn Beauchesne on the team, have plenty of veterans like Carter Stevens, Hunter McKenzie, new captain Charlie Pacquette, and even extremely young top prospects like forward Jaakko Wycisk, who should be one of the best players of the 2027 NHL Draft class. Guelph is no London or Oshawa in terms of being loaded with NHL prospects, but there is easily a path that they can take to being a playoff team this season.
The narrative around the Storm being this terrible experience like it’s the worst hockey team ever put together, should probably stop.
There is, of course, always the possibility that Guelph can trade Luchanko at the OHL trade deadline to one of those top-class programs to really get his numbers juiced. Because, maybe being relied upon to be the main focus point of an entire team’s offense is exactly what Luchanko needs to develop more. If he was in Brantford with Jake O’Brien, or Windsor with Jack Nesbitt and Liam Greentree, or Sault Ste. Marie with Brady Martin — he would certainly produce more points but would his offensive game truly develop in the way that we want if he wasn’t so leaned on like he is in Guelph?
Plus, if all we want to see is Luchanko score triple-digit points and get his name up on that table above, and see these endless highlights of him destroying defenses, for us to feel more confident in his development, now is the year to do it. The OHL is seeing a grand exodus of top prospects leave the junior league to go play in the NCAA. We already know that from Porter Martone heading to Michigan State but it’s all over the league. Without those top-end players, scoring will become even easier and some players can get that push into getting more comfortable scoring in game scenarios — which might just be what Luchanko needs.
All in all, it just makes sense. There is more historic evidence of players not plateauing or having their development affected by going back to junior hockey, than the opposite. Most of the time, if there is evidence of players growing lazy as scoring becomes too easy and they don’t get anything out of a crucial development year, it’s those players that have nowhere near the drive that Luchanko has.
We all know that he could survive, yes. But do we want a prospect just trying to grasp at straws and barely stay afloat to prevent them from drowning, at just 19 years old? Do we really think that his offensive habits would benefit from not being able to do anything while on the ice? There’s more risk there of truly becoming a bottom-six center for eternity.
By going back to the OHL, Luchanko can work as hard as he know he will and come in with a fresh understanding next year, of what he can do offensively and how he could start his full-time professional career. It just makes more sense for the 19-year-old center to know where he will be playing, to go be a main contributor on the World Juniors team, and then approach the Flyers’ 2026 training camp with an even higher drive to be an impact NHL centerman. We don’t want any players just doing what they can to get by. We want prospects to flourish.
