February 24, 2026
Kyle Ross/Imagn Images
Rasmus Ristolainen should be a name teams are checking in on after his performance for Finland at the Olympics.
This week, it's back to the NHL grind and back to reality for the Philadelphia Flyers.
The Olympics are over, but some narratives have been considerably rewritten now that the league's players are on their way back from Milan, more specifically to the Flyers, with their two defensemen who made the trip.
Travis Sanheim went with Team Canada, and building off his 4 Nations Face-Off appearance last February, he kept skating with many of the NHL's biggest names like he belonged right there with them. The run took him up to a bitterly accepted silver medal on Sunday while the U.S. was at the other end of the rink celebrating. He should, eventually, be proud of the journey, though, and when the Flyers' schedule resumes on Wednesday in Washington, there should be a few more eyes on him as one of the NHL's better blueliners.
There should be more attention on Rasmus Ristolainen, too, but for a bit of a different reason.
Ristolainen went with Team Finland for the Olympics and thrived in a heavy-checking, heavy-minute role next to the Florida Panthers' Niko Mikkola.
Finland won the bronze medal. Ristolainen played a huge part in that, even led the tournament in plus-minus at one point, and did so as a right-handed shot playing a tough, physical game that teams salivate over in the playoffs.
By the way, the NHL trade deadline is next Friday, March 6.
It's back to the grind and back to reality.
The Flyers' season slid into freefall before the Olympic break, through injury, sloppy play, needless drama, and then exhaustion by the end that all compounded to leave them maybe too far to the outside looking in of the playoff picture to fully recover.
As of Tuesday morning, they're 25-20-11 for 61 points in the Eastern Conference. The Bruins and Sabres, who both went into the break with considerable momentum, are holding both Wild Card spots – Boston with 69 points and Buffalo with 70 – while the refreshed New York Islanders with star rookie Matthew Schaefer are occupying third place in the Metropolitan Division at their own 69 points.
In between, four other clubs sit ahead of the Flyers in the standings for either the Wild Card 2-seed or Metro 3-seed, and they have just 26 games to make up the difference.
They're not done, but the odds of them rallying back into the race aren't exactly great either. They need to be near perfect, and other teams need to crumble while they're at it.
So with that in mind, the Flyers will return with a run of five games before the deadline next Friday, starting with Wednesday and Thursday's road back-to-back against the Capitals and then the Rangers.
And with that time, general manager Danny Brière has to make a decision: does he let the team continue to ride out the season with what they have? Or does he pivot back into a deadline sell to try and collect assets for one more year?
The long-term future of the team might still need the latter route.
To be clear, Brière, and president of hockey operations Keith Jones, went into the season not looking to be deadline sellers this time around, and they've both maintained that throughout.
However, they also wanted to see the team on the ice take a tangible step forward in its results under Rick Tocchet as its newly installed head coach. Playoffs weren't mandatory, again to be clear. But they would've been nice, and there was a path to them. Still, there just had to be visible improvement.
They got it for the first few months when the Flyers were hanging in there, with forward Trevor Zegras and goalie Dan Vladar playing as their biggest revelations, but then January came around and the bottom fell out.
The tight defensive structure they committed to out of the gate loosened up, and quickly, those 2-1 wins they were grinding out, or at least pushing into overtime for a point, were snowballing into 3-4 goal losses.
Breakout winger Tyson Foerster went down for the year with injury, and they only seem to miss his strength off the wall and willingness to shoot more and more with each passing game; Matvei Michkov got hit with the sophomore slump hard, regardless of the reason, and finishing this last stretch of the season strong will be a huge priority for him and the organization moving forward; while elsewhere across the roster, the depth has either been lacking or fell into a rut of underperforming, especially and still very noticeably at center, where the team has no truly threatening play driver; oh yeah, and the power play is still deep into the NHL's basement.
Brière also said on multiple occasions, too, that the players would ultimately dictate the pace of the Flyers' rebuild, and going into the break, this is what they signaled: They still have a long way to go toward being competitive.
So, does Brière pick up the phone looking to stock up?
Porter Martone is dominating college hockey, and soon enough, the Flyers will need to find a spot for him.
Junfu Han/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Ristolainen should have teams calling in the next few days after what they saw in the Olympics. He'll still have next season on his contract at a $5.1 million hit that will be way easier to take on with a rising salary cap, but is there a worthwhile, future-minded deal there?
They have a much-highlighted surplus of wingers both on the roster and in the system, too. Do they part with a couple of them before next Friday? They are going to need room for Porter Martone, after all.
And, somehow, someway, they're going to need the ammo to find a game-changing center for the top of their lineup somewhere, because he sure doesn't look like he'll be anywhere on the open free-agent market this summer, so it has to be either through the draft in June or a trade.
So it's back to the grind and back to reality.
The players, they're going to try to close out the year as strong as possible, and maybe try to sneak their way into the playoffs at the last second, only on the big if that all the stars align.
But the reality is that the Flyers still have a lot of holes to fill and a long, long way to go...
And that this summer for Brière will likely be crucial in determining whether they ever even get there.
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