As the week winds down, we’re just a few short days away from the draft. The Flyers find themselves in an interesting position with this one — with a few key areas of their pipeline needing some attention, not many picks to work with, and a relatively thin draft to work within, how they tackle this draft will be an interesting process to watch unfold.
There’s been a lot of noise around the Flyers and their particular need to pick up a center in this draft — and that’s informed quite a few of the national mock draft selections — but is this really the best big play for them? A dive into the depth chart might tell us that their needs are not so straightforward as they might seem.
| Owen Tippett | Christian Dvorak | Travis Konecny |
| Tyson Foerster | Trevor Zegras* | Porter Martone |
| Denver Barkey | Noah Cates | Matvei Michkov |
| Alex Bump | Sean Couturier | Garnet Hathaway |
| Nikita Grebenkin | Jacob Gaucher | Phil Tomasino |
| Alex Ciernik | Jett Luchanko | Devin Kaplan |
| Max Westergard | Karsen Dorwart* | Noah Powell |
| Jack Murtagh | Brett Harrison* | Ilya Pautov |
| Tucker Robertson | Shane Vansaghi | |
| Cole Knuble | ||
| Jack Berglund | ||
| Riley Thompson | ||
| Jack Nesbitt | ||
| Heikki Ruohonen | ||
| Matthew Gard | ||
| Nathan Quinn | ||
| Owen McLaughlin |
Looking (roughly) at the depth chart at the forward position, we see that the Flyers are quite well stocked in the pipeline with centers. Even if we shuffle aside some of the borderline players — like a Zegras or a Dorwart who have split time between the wing and center — and shift our view of Murtagh, who is a natural center but seems like he’s so far being developed as a winger, based on how things have been going up at BU, the center position is still comfortably the deepest.
Of course, the more particular need is to pick up another high-end center in particular, but the broader question is whether that’s something that they can even accomplish, picking in the range that they’re set to. There are a lot of projectably cromulent third line centers set to go in and around the early 20s, but the Flyers aren’t going to find the game breaker that they need in that range unless something truly wild happens earlier on the board.
So where does that leave them? If the drafting philosophy is truly just one of stockpiling as many centers as possible, another middle of the lineup pivot might just be in the cards, but if the team is willing to bring a bit more flexibility, one wonders if they might be swayed to go the direction of a more highly-skilled, higher ceiling winger, despite the baggage they’re carrying at the moment with the current logjam of wingers in the mix for NHL jobs. After all, the old adage advises teams to draft the best player available and figure out the fit a few years down the line when that player is actually in the mix for NHL graduation, and despite all of the prevailing narratives about the Flyers’ need for specifically a center, this might be a draft where they would do particularly well to fall back on that old wisdom.
| Travis Sanheim | Rasmus Ristolainen |
| Cam York | Jamie Drysdale |
| Nick Seeler | Oliver Bonk |
| Simon Benoit | David Jiricek |
| Ty Murchison | Helge Grans |
| Hunter McDonald | Christian Kyrou |
| Jackson Edward | Spencer Gill |
| Artem Guryev | Carter Amico |
| Luke Vlooswyk | |
| Austin Moline |
But of course, what about the defensemen?
The Flyers have something of a strange distribution when it comes to their pool of defense prospects, with the majority of this group either already settled in at the professional level, or set to arrive there in short order. Once Spencer Gill gets into the mix with the Phantoms, as he’s set to do this season, the Flyers will have just three prospects at the defense position playing outside of the AHL or ECHL. The cupboard is full enough in a vacuum, but it doesn’t leave them set all that well for a seamless transition of new prospects at the AHL level a few years down the line when others have graduated up to the NHL, or else moved out of the organization entirely if a long-term fit isn’t found. There’s still time to shore up the position and set it up where there won’t be a noticeable gap, but the window to do so through the draft is shrinking.
| Dan Vladar |
| Joseph Woll |
| Aleksei Kolosov |
| Carson Bjarnason |
| Yegor Zavragin |
The position where they’re the thinnest, undoubtedly though, is goaltending. The good news in the midst of all of this is the fact that, by the nature of how roster constructions play out, they don’t have as many places to stash goaltenders on the organizational ladder, so they don’t need quite as much depth to begin with, but still, there’s a bit of a concerning drop-off that we see unfolding here.
As it stands, the Flyers have their NHL tandem locked down for the foreseeable future, and they have a good pair of prospects already getting settled into the AHL in Kolosov and Bjarnason, ready to step up in the short term if needed, and still have the door at least cracked for them to force a move to allow either of them carve out a longer term role, should they turn around and positively bang down the door from the American League. Beyond that, they have Zavragin who is, despite something of a whiplashing of a development arc, finding some solid results up and down in the Russian leagues, and set to be on his way over to North America in the next couple of years, and in spite of all of the weirdness and distance, still reasonably comfortably holds on to the title of the organization’s top prospect at the position. But, after them, that’s it. The Flyers haven’t selected a goalie in a draft since 2023 (when they picked both Bjarnason and Zavragin). And while we can see they’re well enough stocked at the present moment, things can change very quickly, and as such, many team generally take the approach of bringing in a constant stream of new goaltending pieces into their mix as insurance for a reason.
The Flyers won’t be looking to use their first round pick to add to this portion of the pipeline, but they might be well served if they can use one of these — admittedly scarce — picks to bolster it a bit. They don’t have much wiggle room to work with in this draft, and with a few key areas in need of shoring up, they’ll need to find a way to make the most of these picks.
