With the five-year extension of Christian Dvorak, there’s lots of things to think about in terms of the Flyers’ organizational vision of the next great Flyers team. What does it mean for Trevor Zegras? What does it mean for the Flyers view of the free agent and trade markets? What does it mean for Danny Briere and Co.’s overarching philosophy?
And finally, perhaps most important for the next great Flyers team, what does the move to extend Dvorak for five years tell us about the Flyers’ organizational view of its prospects? In particular, what it means for the top center prospect in the organization – Jett Luchanko – is perhaps the most damning.
What does it mean for Jett Luchanko?
Fresh off a World Juniors performance where Luchanko only registered one assist in seven games, the conversation around Luchanko only continued to be overwhelmingly negative. He was active and involved in a ton of the games, particularly in Canada’s semifinal loss to Czechia, but if you’re not lighting up the scoresheet in the World Juniors, the discussion around you is likely to be bad. Just the way it goes for top prospects in this tournament, even if the tournament doesn’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things. Plenty of players that stand out in this tournament become nothing significant in the NHL, and plenty of players that struggle become pretty darn good. Hopefully, that is the case for Luchanko.
The timing of this Dvorak extension is probably mostly coincidental, but there’s no way it’s a good sign for Luchanko’s organizational standing. Ever since the Flyers “reached” for Luchanko at No. 13 overall, the gap between the public perception of Luchanko and the Flyers’ belief in him has been sizable. The Flyers clearly bet on their internal evaluations of Luchanko, and their belief that the playmaking, two-way ability of Luchanko would translate into an effective top-6 center. Well, just two years after the Luchanko selection, the Flyers now have three of their four center positions locked down for the foreseeable future, with relatively unmovable contracts for two of them. It’s getting difficult to see a spot for Luchanko down the middle in the coming years, which again, begs the question as to why the Flyers would re-sign Dvorak for so long.
For one, this has to mean there’s increasing doubt within the organization that Luchanko will ever live up to the Flyers’ original evaluation of him. Luchanko’s a player that has fantastic physical tools and a high NHL floor, but his ceiling has always been the point of disagreement between public scouts and the Flyers. Not reaching that ceiling is becoming more and more likely by the day, as his scoring in the OHL has been only decently strong in his Draft+2 season. On a point per game basis, Luchanko’s scoring rate is at 1.47 this season, compared to a 1.21 points per game rate last year. That’s a sizable improvement, but you were hoping for an absolutely dominant Luchanko this season in order to start really believing in his higher ceiling. 1.47 points per game is a good mark, but you want just a bit more from Luchanko both on the scoresheet and by the eye test.
Perhaps, after the middling World Juniors performance, the Flyers fully began to understand this reality. Signing Dvorak for five whole seasons after this one, with Couturier (2030 UFA) and Cates (2029 UFA) already on the books, essentially blocks Luchanko down the middle. Sure, Dvorak could move to wing, but the roster construction as it sits makes that unfeasible. The Flyers seem wed to the Trevor Zegras hybrid wing plan, and we already know about the logjam on the Flyers’ wings. Multiple players currently in the top-9 have to be shipped out at some point in order to make room for the prospects. Maybe Luchanko forces the issue down the middle in the next couple of seasons, but it just got a whole lot more difficult for him to do so. Barring a trade of Sean Couturier (very unlikely), Noah Cates (he’s actually good and it would hurt), or Christian Dvorak (extremely unlikely, at least for 2 years), Luchanko’s stuck.
Luchanko might just end up being shifted to the wing, and that will only further complicate the logjam. There’s lots to question about Luchanko anymore, and as it becomes more difficult to see the high-end outcome for him becoming reality, the Flyers entire plan gets murkier and murkier. Again, it’s not impossible that Luchanko hits the ceiling still, it’s just becoming a bit harder to envision.
The selection of Luchanko was a real hinge point for this rebuild, and while it won’t define the entire success of the years-long process, signing Dvorak for this long with the current state of the center depth might be a bit of an admission about where things stand with the prospect.
A quick note on what it means for other prospects
Other than Luchanko, guys like World Juniors standouts Jack Berglund and Heikki Ruohonen just had their path to roster spots get a lot more complicated. Unless one of those guys becomes dominant out of nowhere and a top of the lineup center, their high-end outcomes were always 3C/4C types. Looking at the current roster, all three of the Flyers centers under significant terms are low-end 2C types or 3Cs. The exact type of role that those types of prospects would be playing in. You can even bring Jack Nesbitt into the conversation too, even though he’s a longer term project than both Berglund and Ruohonen right now.
While you hope that mid-round selections like Berglund and Ruohonen become effective bottom sixers like Dvorak has been this season, blocking the possible development of guys like them is not at all what teams with an eye towards the future does. It indicates a team that thinks they are a lot closer to winning than they actually are, one that prioritizes the now over the future. While the Dvorak contract doesn’t make it impossible for any one of these guys to pop up in the future, it makes it a whole lot harder for that to happen.
