By Nick Tricome
Copyright phillyvoice
The ice is down at the Wells Fargo Center Xfinity Mobile Arena, and Flyers prospects are reporting back to Voorhees this week for rookie camp, with on-ice sessions beginning Thursday morning.
Flyers governor Dan Hiflerty and president of hockey operations Keith Jones will also be speaking to the media on Wednesday morning to discuss the state of the team.
A new NHL season is closing in, one where the Flyers will be looking to take a step forward, but to what extent isn’t clear.
How much better can Matvei Michkov be in Year 2? Is Trevor Zegras the diamond-in-the-rough center the lineup has been in need of? And is Rick Tocchet the true answer behind the bench?
All those questions, and a whole lot more, will still start getting answered once things really start kicking into gear with the Flyers’ full training camp later this month.
But for now, here are a few thoughts on the rookie camp roster and a quiet stretch of the summer that doesn’t have much longer left…
Roster review
The Flyers’ rookie camp roster isn’t as exciting this time around as it has been in the recent past.
Granted, its immediate comparison is to last summer’s rookie group, which included the sudden but highly anticipated arrival of star prospect Michkov, who became the face of the organization’s rebuild aspirations upon his seventh overall selection in the 2023 NHL Draft.
Fans turned up in droves to the Flyers Training Center in Voorhees to get their first glimpse at the team’s new future star, and there were a lot more cameras along the glass and within the media conference room than there had been for the Flyers in quite a while.
But now there’s familiarity, which dulls the mystery, and in turn, the excitement a bit.
Michkov has his spot on the team now. You won’t be seeing him out in an official capacity until training camp later on.
As for the rest of the prospects who will be turning up this week?
Center Jack Nesbitt, the 12th overall draft pick from back in June, will be at rookie camp, but is in line to develop for another year in Canadian juniors with Windsor.
Forward Denver Barkey and defenseman Oliver Bonk, the two well-regarded 2023 draft prospects from the London Knights, will return to Voorhees and will be turning pro this season, but this is their third year within the organization, and the general expectation is that they’ll need time with the Phantoms in the AHL first before talk really starts turning toward NHL looks for either.
Speedy center Jett Luchanko, the 2024 first-round pick who cracked last year’s opening night roster, will also be back. He just doesn’t seem to have that same momentum behind him to make the team again, which traps him in an awkward development spot where he maybe isn’t good enough to hang full-time in the NHL yet, but is still too young of a junior prospect to make the AHL cutoff, while also being too good to learn much more with his current OHL club in Guelph – and this is all at least according to how the junior prospect transfer rules stand for right now.
Luchanko also had a groin injury that sidelined him during development camp earlier in the summer, with the Flyers still waiting to find out whether he’s clear again, per NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Jordan Hall. That dampens the hype a bit, too.
The real standout in rookie camp, as he was in development camp, is Alex Bump, who very much looks to be the wing prospect with a serious shot at making the NHL club.
Who isn’t there
In a way, the Flyers’ rookie camp roster is just as much defined by who isn’t there.
There’s no Porter Martone, Shane Vansaghi, Jack Murtagh, Cole Knuble, Jack Berglund, or Heikki Ruohonen.
A good chunk of the Flyers’ notable prospects from the past couple of summers are either set to play college hockey in the NCAA or professionally overseas, and because of their obligations to their current respective clubs/programs, they can’t be in Voorhees this week.
That’s not a bad thing. It just redirects fans’ attention a bit, especially toward Michigan State, where Martone and Vansaghi look set to be a part of college hockey’s next powerhouse.
Who can rebound
Once the dust settled from the rush of Rick Tocchet’s hiring in May, to the draft in late June, and then to free agency in early July, thoughts and speculation gradually started shifting to which Flyers might benefit the most under Tocchet as the calendar really shifted into the slow part of the summer.
A quick rundown of Flyers who took a step or two back in the late stages of the John Tortorella era but might stand to rebound with the 2025-26 season as a clean slate:
• Cam York: He got his five-year extension after a rocky second half of last season that seemed to reach its real low point with a benching and a subsequent pseudo-scratching for disciplinary reasons (he dressed in case of emergency but never left the bench). York has long been pretty consistent in the way of taking up heavy first-pairing minutes from night to night, and has gotten sharper in his own end, but hasn’t had that true breakout yet. York is coming back healthy, though, and Tocchet does like mobile defenseman. Now would be as good a time as any.
• Jamie Drysdale: Ditto for Drysdale, who is a highly fluid skater, but still has a lot of the defensive puzzle to put together. When the Flyers got him in return from Anaheim for Cutter Gauthier going on two years ago, general manager Danny Brière stressed that the appeal of him was in the defenseman he’ll be in five years rather than right at the moment, and he has shown flashes of how good he can be as a puck-moving, offensive-minded D-man. But it is also going to be Year 3 for him in Philly. He has to show much greater signs that he will tap into his potential – along with being able to stay healthy and on the ice.
• Owen Tippett: Tippett is a power forward with some incredible speed and skill, and maybe one of the gnarliest backhanders in the NHL. But it felt like all that disappeared for long stretches far too often last season. In the prior two years, he racked up 27 and then 28 goals, with a shot and a knack for finding his way into open ice that pointed to his next step being a break into the 30-35 goal territory. This upcoming season for Tippett should be about striving back toward it.
• Sean Couturier: At the end of last season, once Tortorella was fired, Couturier wasn’t shy about not having the best relationship with the former head coach nor sharing the belief that his style of play wasn’t the best fit for Tortorella’s relentlessly checking system. And in fairness, Couturier has always thrived with a slower, anticipatory style of game where he hangs higher up to jump on opponents’ mistakes when exiting the zone. Maybe Tocchet will be more open to letting Couturier return to that kind of approach. At the least, though, it is going to be important for Couturier and Tocchet to foster a much more positive relationship as captain and coach.
Who takes the reins?
The priority for Brière in his first couple of years as GM was to restock the Flyers’ prospect pipeline while trimming off the organizational fat they didn’t intend to carry forward.
Heading into this summer, Brière said he believed the Flyers’ process was mostly done on those two fronts and would be shifting into a phase where they could start adding in an effort to better the team.
They did in small steps, with the pre-draft trade for Zegras and then the short-term free agent signings of goalie Dan Vladar, center Christian Dvorak, and depth defensemen Noah Juulsen and Dennis Gilbert.
But going back to the prospects, Brière mentioned they would all reach a point where they’d be knocking on the NHL door all within a relatively small window of one another, and that would sew natural competition for who would really become part of the long-term picture.
Michkov is already here, Tyson Foerster has cemented himself as a core piece with two solid seasons, and Noah Cates and Bobby Brink are younger pieces in good standing, too.
But now Bump is aiming for a roster spot, Martone, Vansaghi, Bonk, Barkey, and Hunter McDonald, and a goaltending prospect like Carson Bjarnason (as it concerns Vladar and Sam Ersson), they’re all a step closer and on their way, and there are only so many roster spots to go around.
Plus, you’re starting to see longer time/former prospects who were once higher up on the organizational ladder, like Samu Tuomaala and possibly even Egor Zamula now, start to fade.
It’s still a long and slow-moving journey, but the Flyers are getting better.
Part of getting better, though, is making the tough calls for who really gets to stick around.
The Flyers can’t stockpile every young hopeful they have anymore. The long-term picture has to start getting sharper, and the next month coming up could be the beginning of a significant turning point for that.
Daydreaming elsewhere
The biggest storyline in the NHL right now is what Connor McDavid’s next contract is going to be, and in a very off chance, where it’s going to be.
He’s the best player in the league, and with the salary cap only going up, his status as such stands to reset the market for what a superstar-level contract can look like.
Entering the last year of his current deal with the Oilers, he’ll be a free agent in the summer of 2026 (if he gets there), but is eligible to sign a new contract with Edmonton now.
And look, it’s a 99.999999999999999999-percent chance he’ll remain as an Oiler….
But man, if it isn’t fun to at least wonder about a scenario where McDavid ends up somewhere else (like in a different orange sweater). Hey, it never hurts to dream.
Plus, there’s always that one catch about the Edmonton Oilers: They were the team that messed up hard enough to trade Wayne Gretzky of all people.
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