The Philadelphia Flyers’ 2024-25 season is all about growth and development. They aren’t trying to necessarily force wins out of this upcoming campaign, but they want their young players that are already in prime positions, to get better and take the next step towards solidifying themselves in the NHL and being a part of an eventually good team.
A level below the young NHLers like Tyson Foerster and Joel Farabee that this hope is attached to, is a group of players who have spent a decent amount of time in the AHL and just really want to even make the NHL roster. That is what training camp is all about, in the end. Players trying to prove that they took a stride towards being better than some other players and earning themselves a spot on the final 23-man roster.
One of those players is defenseman Ronnie Attard. After turning pro in 2022 and spending two full seasons in the AHL, and being able to play 12 games for the Flyers last season, he is now at a crucial moment in his young career. Due to his age, Attard is no longer ineligible for waivers and to be sent down to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, he will need to be made available to the other 31 teams to then be on their own NHL rosters, for free.
In the weeks of training camp, he needed to prove to the Flyers coaching staff that he belonged in the NHL to not suddenly have his life potentially thrown around and have to move across the continent or to an entirely different country. And unfortunately, during his first taste of preseason action and the first opportunity to show people beyond the team practices that he can do it, he failed.
During Monday night’s game against the Montreal Canadiens, Attard was most likely everyone’s consensus worst performance of the night. What he has been praised for throughout his career — being decently mobile for his size and having a booming shot — was rarely shown and instead, we saw a collection of mistakes and two of them directly led to opposing goals in the 5-0 defeat.
The first was certainly the most egregious. With the pressure of just one, single forechecker and the 25-year-old defenseman having possession, he just lost control of the puck in a 1-on-1 situation — possibly the worst scenario, with sole focus on him — and it led to an extremely easy goal.
Woof.
And then later, Attard was not as directly responsible for a goal against, but he just didn’t have the wheels to backcheck hard enough to prevent the player he was in charge of covering, to get to the netfront and pop in another easy goal.
Those are two brutal mistakes. And considering that it was the Flyers were shutout and had to whimper their way back to Philadelphia for a couple days of practice and that there will not be another game until Thursday to talk about, Attard will be the center of attention.
And it’s kind of deserving. He had an opportunity to make an impression and jump his way up the depth chart to maybe have an Egor Zamula-esque training camp that was just good enough for them to not risk waivers. All he had to do was be decent so that GM Danny Briere and the Flyers did not want another team snatching him up for free. Attard could have easily fit as one of the defensemen on this roster. Travis Sanheim, Jamie Drysdale, and Rasmus Ristolainen are cemented as the right-side blueliners, but beyond that all Attard needs to compete with for being the next guy up is an elderly Erik Johnson.
If he did not blow his chance and Ristolainen might not be as healthy as we thought, or Sanheim needed to go on the left side because of a Nick Seeler injury (or something like that); then we could have seen Attard get some games. Now, because of one single performance that was so outstandingly bad, he most likely will be stuck in the AHL unless there is a catastrophic amount of injuries on the blue line.
