Ranking every Flyers first-round pick since 2004

Monday on Twitter, our friends over at SBNation Capitals blog Japers’ Rink tweeted out the following ranking of all of the team’s first-round picks since 2004:

My two-minute, knee-jerk ranking of all Caps first-round picks since 2004 (taking into account where the pick was made, not just how it turned out). pic.twitter.com/zPGpoJgvqE

— Japers’ Rink (@JapersRink) October 5, 2020

Now, here, as a Flyers fan reading a Flyers blog, you may be thinking: “Kurt, I don’t care about the Capitals’ first-round picks since 2004.”

Well, you’re in luck. Because I don’t either! But a good idea’s a good idea, and we’re stealing that one. Today, as the Flyers — barring something unforeseen — prepare to make a first-round pick for the tenth year in a row, let’s rank every Flyers draft pick since the 2004-05 full-season lockout.

We’ll try to do this based on two criteria:

• Was this a good draft pick?
• Did this player outperform/underperform his draft slot? (In other words, if two players had roughly equal careers,  but one was picked 10 slots after the other one, he would be ranked ahead.)/

And with that, we begin.

16. Steve Downie — 29th overall, 2005

Nah.

15. Jay O’Brien — 19th overall, 2018

It is quite possibly too early to be making a sweeping declaration on O’Brien, who is only two years removed from being a surprise first-round pick by Ron Hextall (his final first-round pick as general manager of the Flyers, we would later learn). But the O’Brien pick was a bit off the board even at the time, and his two seasons since then — one as a freshman at Providence College, one as an over-ager in the BCHL — have not exactly proved the team that took a chance on him right. He’ll be at Boston University whenever college hockey gets going again, but as a junior older than most of the players he’s up against, anything short of domination will probably be considered not good enough. He’s got time to turn it around, but for now he’s near the bottom of this list.

14. Samuel Morin — 11th overall, 2003

Piling on Morin isn’t fun. We all know what he’s gone through in the last three years, not making the team following training camp in 2017 and then suffering two torn ACLs in the three seasons that followed. Morin is still with the organization, he figures to be with the Phantoms next year, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he gets some time with the NHL team at some point next season if there are some injuries and he plays well in Lehigh Valley. But at the end of the day, we’re seven years removed from the Morin selection, and if all goes according to plan for the Flyers next year, Morin probably still won’t be getting time for the team at the NHL level. For a guy taken as high as he was, that’s a rough outcome.

13. German Rubtsov — 22nd overall, 2016

The book is far from having been written on Rubtsov, who had a turbulent (read: not particularly good) pair of seasons following his draft year, got out to a good start at the AHL level before getting a season-ending shoulder injury, and then had a decent second season with the Phantoms that earned him a brief early-season call-up to the Flyers that did not go well. Rubtsov still has time to turn into a productive NHLer, but at this point, it feels like expecting him to be more than a solid third-liner is wishful thinking.

12. Luca Sbisa — 19th overall, 2008

Listen. Did Luca Sbisa end up being a good NHL defenseman? No, not really. Did the Flyers manage to use 39 games the year after he was drafted to make him look better than he probably was, effectively pumping-and-dumping him in a trade that brought them Chris Pronger, who helped them get two wins away from a Stanley Cup the following year? Yes, they did. There are worse things to do with the 19th pick.

11. Cam York — 14th overall, 2019

York is the one player on this list for whom it is too early to make any sort of real declaration on how good a pick he was, so he gets placed here, between the guys who have at least carved out an NHL career and the ones who have not. York, by all accounts, was picked right around where he was expected to be, and had a solid freshman year at Michigan. He looks like he’s going to be a good player, but he hasn’t quite become a can’t-miss prospect — there’s a lot of uncertainty still on the table here.

10. Nolan Patrick — 2nd overall, 2017

This one’s tough. Surely, Patrick’s missed season due to migraine disorders has bumped him down the rankings a bit here. The uncertainty that comes with his situation going forward has the potential to make this pick — which, to be absolutely clear, is one that everyone would have made at the time — look like a real miss, particularly given how good the other players in the top-5 of that draft have all been. But at the same time … had we done this ranking prior to the start of the 2019-20 season, before we knew of Patrick’s health issues, how much higher would he have been? Patrick had a respectable first two NHL seasons, and given that those seasons happened at ages 19 and 20 the odds are he’s going to get better than he was in those seasons before all is said and done. But the bar set for second overall picks is pretty high, even at the beginnings of their careers. Here’s hoping Patrick gets back to full health and is able to continue fighting to reach that high bar.

9. Scott Laughton — 20th overall, 2012

This feels about right, right? Laughton was a good prospect, and then spent four years kicking between the AHL and NHL trying to figure out his role, and in the past two years he’s really settled in as a competent middle-six forward at the NHL level. Long path there, and while he’s no one’s definition of a superstar, he’s a good, versatile player who figures to be a useful piece in this league for a while. That feels like a reasonable expectation for the 20th pick.

8. Morgan Frost — 27th overall, 2017

I could be convinced that this is too high. I could also be talked into believing this is too low. Frost was another guy who at draft time looked like he was taken above where most expected him to be. Unlike some of the other guys here who have fallen under that distinction, Frost immediately made it look silly, lighting the OHL on fire for two years and briefly cracking the NHL roster for a stretch during this past season. There’s still a lot of room for improvement here — making the NHL team to start next season would be a start — but there’s a lot of potential here, more-so than one would probably expect from the 27th pick in the draft.

7. James van Riemsdyk — 2nd overall, 2007

Another tricky one, and since we’re just evaluating the pick, I tried not to hold it against JVR that his best years as an NHLer came with a team that wasn’t the Flyers. JVR has objectively had a very good career as an NHL forward. He’s been a no-doubt top-6 winger since basically his second full season in the league, and he’s capable of some truly dominant stretches of play even at his current age and place. But like with Patrick, it feels as if there’s a bar that’s set for the 2nd overall pick that van Riemsdyk just hasn’t quite reached. The pick was a good one — it’s not like there was anyone else at the top of that draft that looks like a better pick in hindsight — but it’s not unreasonable to have wanted more from this pick.

6. Joel Farabee — 14th overall, 2018

As with some others here, it’s entirely too early to act like we know what’s going to become of Farabee. But few others that have already been named on this list emerged as legitimate NHL pieces in their age-19 season, and an early look at who’s managed to make a name for themselves from that draft doesn’t show any obvious misses after Farabee. The winger already looks like a smart, well-rounded player who does a lot of things well, and it’s hard not to think he’s going to get better. It’s anyone’s guess how high Farabee’s ceiling is, but the absolute floor is that of a good middle-6 winger who can contribute in multiple ways and multiple situations. If that’s all he is, that’s a mildly underwhelming outcome for the 14th pick in the draft, but it seems unlikely that’s all he is.

5. Travis Sanheim — 17th overall, 2014

Ron Hextall’s first draft pick as general manager of the Flyers felt like a bit of a reach at the moment it happened, but Sanheim quickly made it not look like one, as he was one of the WHL’s best defensemen for the following two years. His progression has been fairly steady from there; he had one full season with the Phantoms, an up-and-down rookie year, and at this point he’s a clear second-pair defenseman. That’s a solid outcome for a pick in the late teens. Can he become more? It feels like there’s a bit more juice to be squeezed from this orange, and that idea simultaneously helps explain not only why he’s higher than the other names we’ve talked about but also why he’s lower than the names that are yet to come.

4. Ivan Provorov — 7th overall, 2015

When Provorov was drafted in the Top 10 of that franchise-changing 2015 draft, the expectation was clear: this was the Flyers’ eventual number-one defenseman. Little did we know that “eventual” didn’t end up being that long — nominally, Provorov became the Flyers’ number-one defenseman about two months into his tenure with the team. It seems like it took him a bit longer to actually look like that top defenseman, but for the first time this past season the Flyers got that Provorov for just about the whole year. He’s a really, really good defenseman and a top-pair cornerstone, which is basically what we were hoping for with that pick.

3. Travis Konecny — 24th overall, 2015

Sorting out these guys between four and two is very, very difficult. Konecny was the one of these three for whom the expectations were probably the lowest, and he plays the position that’s generally considered to be the least valuable. But if you consider him even just a little bit below Provorov and Sean Couturier on the pecking order, should he be above those guys? The Flyers knew the value at that pick was there, given that they traded up to get him, and they were very clearly right. Konecny was the team’s leading scorer this past season, and is a clear top-6 winger going forward. If what we saw from him this past season is what we’re expecting to get going forward, you can probably justify putting him second on this list. And it’s worth noting that, to this point in his career, he’s probably outperformed what Couturier had to a similar point. You could convince me he could be second on this list.

2. Sean Couturier — 8th overall, 2011

Yet it’s hard to look past what Couturier has done in the last three to five seasons. The expectations were high for a guy who was a top-10 pick, and it took Couturier a while to truly look like the guy the Flyers thought they were getting with that pick. But he took on some absolutely thankless responsibility early on in his career, often with linemates that were nothing at all to write home about, and as soon as the Flyers put him in positions to succeed, he took advantage of them. Draft analysts back in 2011 talked about Sean Couturier as a future Selke winner, so the expectations here were high from the start, but it’s something else to go and actually meet expectations that high.

1. Claude Giroux — 22nd overall, 2006

For all of the difficult decisions in compiling this list, there wasn’t an easier decision than this one. Claude Giroux has been the face of the franchise for this decade. He was genuinely one of the best players in the NHL for most of the 2010s, he was nominated for one Hart Trophy and should have been for probably two more, and he did it all without a ton of help for at least half of that decade. He is not the best player on the Flyers any more, but he’s been this team’s heart for a long time. Not bad for the 22nd pick in the draft.

If we agree that Claude Giroux is the best first-round pick the Flyers have made since 2004, who is the second-best (taking draft position into account)?