The Flyers are settling into the month of December and still find themselves bogged down by injuries. With a couple of key absences on the back end persisting — Cam York remains out with an upper-body injury, and Rasmus Ristolainen is still likely a couple of weeks away from being ready to make his return to the lineup — the Flyers are still looking for answers on their best mix, their best chance to keep this thing rolling without them. Sunday’s game saw them pulling Egor Zamula into the lineup to play alongside Noah Juulsen on the third pair, but he struggled pretty mightily in that game, so now it seems they’re looking elsewhere.
Enter: Ty Murchison.
Murchison, a left shooting defenseman drafted by the Flyers back in 2021 in the fifth round, is settling into his first season of professional hockey after completing four years at Arizona State University, and has been making a really positive impression in this rookie season. He was called up ostensibly to serve as an emergency extra for Sunday’s game, but he’ll be getting the nod to make his NHL debut tonight against the Sharks.
So, what exactly does Murchison bring to the table, and what might we expect to see from him in this debut? Let’s get into it.
Murchison’s game
On the whole, Murchison’s game isn’t one that’s overly flashy, but it’s been a largely effective one through the first couple of months of the season down in the AHL. The bread and butter of his game is a steadier, more shutdown style of play, delivering subtle but effective positioning and a good quickness to gap up well and chip pucks away from opponents with a good play with the stick, or creating that separation with a heavier body check. It’s a style that’s been working well for him both in his even 5-on-5 matchups, but also on the penalty kill (a situation where, despite his inexperience in the league, he’s being leaned on to a good degree).
Some of the biggest moments of flash that he has brought this season have come in the form of timely shot blocks, and there’s a certain fearlessness in his game when it comes to putting himself in the line of fire on these shots, no matter the physical cost. Even these are not the types of plays which are necessarily going to wind up on the highlight reels, but they have quickly made him a valuable piece of this defense group, and quickly endeared him to his new teammates, in turn.
Murchison also plays a very physically engaged style, and while that did lead to some penalty troubles early in the season (understandably, as he worked to figure out where the line is and how the game is called at this level), he’s proved to be a quick study and has been largely effective this season at being that physically disruptive presence without stepping over the line and putting his team at a disadvantage. This isn’t an easy lesson to learn for a number of rookies in this league, but it’s been impressive how quickly he’s been able to pick that up.
That said, while Murchison has made a name for himself playing that heavy, physical, shutdown game, it at times belies the more well-rounded game he’s capable of bringing. Murchison is quite mobile for his size, smooth-skating and able to bring a good amount of pace, and while he leans more heavily on quick passing to kickstart a breakout, he has enough confidence in his ability with the puck to step up as a more active force on the rush, skating it into the neutral zone himself. He has that booming shot that he can get through traffic from the blue line — he’s gotten a goal and a few more good looks from it since he joined the team last spring — but he’s also shown flashes of confidence to tap into more of a finesse game, dropping deeper into the offensive zone to take a more active role on the cycle.
Now, playing with Christian Kyrou as much as he has this season hasn’t left him with as many opportunities to jump into that role, but this does remain an element that he can keep in the toolkit as it were, and tap into as the space opens up for it.
His fit with Juulsen
Based on the lines run in yesterday’s practice, it’s looking like Murchison is set to make this debut playing alongside Noah Juulsen on the third pair. It’s a role which makes sense, as they can ease him into things with more limited minutes and less intense matchups, playing alongside a steadier veteran for support, which is ideal for a player getting his first taste of the league.
This will be, though, a much different stylistic combination than Murchison is used to playing. That is, he’s spent just about the whole of this season playing alongside playing alongside Kyrou (they’ve been paired together in every game since the trade), and while he’s tasked with doing the heavier defensive lifting on that line, his primary role is, given how dependable of a force in transition he’s stepped up as, to just get the puck to Kyrou and let him make the next play. Here, though, Juulsen is set up to take that stabilizer role, and one wonders if this will mean that this will just work out as a pair of double stable defenders, or if the door will open up here for Murchison to take a more active role as a puck mover.
Over the long term, this might not be an arrangement which makes a ton of sense stylistically, but with this all but certainly being more of a stopgap situation — York’s absence isn’t expected to be a long one, and Rasmus Ristolainen, who took practice yesterday, is trending towards a return soon as well — it’s one which should serve them well enough for the time being.
At the end of the day, this is the Flyers giving a prospect a chance to show them what he can do and see if he can give them a little bit more than what they’ve been getting from the bottom of their lineup on defense, but it’s also a nice bit of recognition for the work he’s done down with the Phantoms in his first professional season. He’s been buying into their system, learning the ways of the league quickly, and settling into a useful foundational role on their back end, and vaulted himself up the depth chart in the process. There’s still work yet to be done, but this is a nice acknowledgment of the work done so far.
