The Trevor Zegras trade is a bet on what the Flyers have built

There are times in sports when a team makes a move and you immediately have a very good feeling that it\'s not going to work.

If that was an ominous way to lead off an article that has a picture of the Flyers\' new offseason acquisition at the top of the page, let\'s be clear here -- the Flyers\' trade for Trevor Zegras on Monday is absolutely not one of those moves. As has been outlined here and elsewhere, the downside risk for Danny Briere and the Flyers in making this move is minimal in dang near every way possible. The asset cost for a team that entered the week with seven picks in the draft\'s top 50 feels very low, as does the opportunity cost when you consider a) how little the Flyers had at center at the moment and b) how unlikely it may be that an obviously better trade option at the position presents itself this offseason. The upside swing here for a 24-year-old who has already had long stretches of high-end play in his career is 100 percent worthwhile. If you\'re Briere, you make this trade every single time.

Still, the possibility that this ends up being a bust on the ice has to be acknowledged. There\'s a reason a Ducks team that used a top-10 pick on Zegras has by all accounts been trying to trade him for what seems like years now, right? The fact that the Flyers\' underwhelming offer was apparently the best that the Ducks could get for Zegras tells you where public opinion generally is on him, doesn\'t it? Zegras has dealt with injury in the last two seasons, and his play during that time while on the ice has fallen off from what it was during those first few years when he looked like a superstar in the making.

Is this going to work? Maybe, maybe not. At the end of the day, it\'s a bet by the Flyers on them having the right environment to resurrect the career of a talented young player who seems to have lost his way.

And that\'s maybe the most interesting part of this. The Flyers were always going to have to try to swing a deal for a big name at some point pretty soon, but Zegras is a fascinating test of whether what the Flyers think they built over John Tortorella\'s tenure as head coach really amounted to anything.

Even if The Rebuild only formally started two years ago with Briere\'s ascension to the top job, it has become clear in hindsight that the soft-launch of the rebuild came courtesy of Tortorella during his first year, when it appeared from the outside that he was the one guy who was willing to stand in front of the microphone and state the obvious -- that there was a lot of work that needed to be done here.

That year was also Chuck Fletcher\'s final year managing the team, and by comparison, Fletcher and Dave Scott and basically anyone else in the organization who would find themselves in front of a microphone was saying that they believed this team was right there. They believed in what had been built, as opposed to what needed to be built. They may have been the only ones.

In July of 2022, the Flyers made their big NHL-level add for the summer, acquiring defenseman Tony DeAngelo from Carolina for three draft picks. (Notably, a package that on paper is pretty similar in terms of value to the one they forked over to Anaheim on Monday for Zegras.) That move was bad. It was a bet on a guy who had burned bridges in basically every stop in his hockey career prior to Carolina, a guy who was known to have something of a mercurial style (to put it politely) both in terms of his on-ice play and his off-ice and locker-room conduct, a guy who only really appeared to have value on the heels of a decent season the year prior on a really good Carolina team that had the infrastructure to take in a player like him. The move ended predictably, with the Flyers buying DeAngelo out after one year in which he and his coach never really saw eye to eye.

As we said here at the time of the trade and extension, it was a deeply delusional move that spoke volumes about the disconnect between what the Flyers\' front office thought it was and what it actually was:

But whatever the underlying force behind it is, here’s what’s clear: the Flyers think they have a winning culture.

They think they’re a team that wins.

Micro-level, this helps explain a move like the DeAngelo acquisition. You can watch him have a fairly good season like he had in Carolina, on a team that was excellent, and think that you can replicate that success here with no concerns about his attitude … as long as you think that you’re just like a Carolina team that has reached the second round four seasons in a row. A Carolina team that had the coaching, systems, and personnel to put DeAngelo in position to succeed, all of which is going to make it significantly less likely that he’s going to be a problem in the room. (The Flyers have all of those things … right?)

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So their solution is to just … convince themselves they’re a team that wins, and conduct themselves as one regardless of whether they’ve actually earned the right to. And once they’ve done that, they can make moves like this one, which is a move that only a team that wins could (and this past season did) get away with, because they think that they’re an organization that has that winning culture and will win unless something out of their control goes wrong.

The Flyers of 2022 just decided they were a winning team, and as such made a move only a winning team could make. The fact that they weren\'t a winning team at all was not relevant in their decision-making process. It was embarrassing and it got the result it deserved.

Which brings us to now, as the Flyers, looking to turn a corner and needing to take something of a risk, make a much smarter and more logical move than that one, but do to so bring in a talented player who has seen some absolutely tantalizing highs but is clearly coming in on a relative low.

So the question, then: is Trevor Zegras the kind of guy who could use a winner to help build his confidence back up?

And, if so: can the Flyers consider themselves winners at this point without actually doing the winning?

When Briere and Keith Jones took over and formed the Leadership Triumvirate, making the decision to keep John Tortorella around, they probably had a pretty good idea that Tortorella was not going to be the head coach of the next great Flyers team. A coach who was going to be 65 years old during your first season in charge of a rebuild was probably never going to be the guy who led you to your next Stanley Cup. He was there, in their view, to set examples, teach players habits that they can use for the rest of their career, and build a culture that would last beyond his own time in the room. A culture, dare we say it, of winning.

If they were right about all of that -- if that was real and what actually happened during Tortorella\'s time as head coach -- if you can build the right culture that fosters winning habits whether it shows up on the scoreboard or not ... that sounds like a great environment for a player like Trevor Zegras to be walking into. If the Flyers were right about what the last two to three years were all about, and the evidence is there amongst the guys still in the room, then you\'re going to be giving Zegras a great chance to rediscover what made him spectacular early in his NHL career.

If they weren\'t? Well, let\'s hope we don\'t have to find out.

Talking Points