May 15, 2026
James Guillory/Imagn Images
The Flyers still need center help, but Trevor Zegras and Christian Dvorak gave them a much better outlook.
Danny Brière's assessment of the Flyers' biggest needs heading into the summer wasn't all that different from what it was a year ago.
They still need center help, the general manager said during his end-of-year press conference at the Flyers Training Center in Voorhees on Thursday, and an upgrade on defense wouldn't be bad either, if it's out there.
Really, the one thing they don't have to worry about now is goaltending, which Brière said was a major credit to Dan Vladar as the starter, and down the stretch, Sam Ersson in backup duty.
"They were excellent," Brière said.
Center, though, remains the big sticking point for the Flyers, as it has for the past several years.
They haven't had that true, elite No. 1 – or at least future one – at the top of the lineup ever since they embarked on their current rebuild course. They still don't, and in all likelihood, they'll still need to find one somewhere to take that eventual leap into the true Stanley Cup contention that they're hoping for.
But this season's breakthrough into the playoffs, and the revelations down the middle of the ice that came along with it, may have just made that need a bit easier to navigate moving forward.
"We've talked about the center position before," Brière said Thursday. "That's probably still there, although it was interesting to see [Trevor Zegras] play there down the stretch. He performed well and into the playoffs. Denver Barkey stepped up and played a couple games in the middle as well. [Sean Couturier] in the role that he played, it was really impressive for him to accept that role, take maybe less responsibilities on offense, but really become a force shutting down opponents – physicality-wise, too, take another step there.
"So, yeah, the center position is something that we're probably gonna look at. If we could improve on defense, we're gonna look at that, too."
It just all seems a bit easier for the Flyers to manage now, which certainly couldn't be said this time a year ago, as the team was heading into another early offseason and a coaching search on top of it.
Sean Couturier's reinvention into an effective bottom-line center was crucial for the Flyers' playoff breakthrough.
Zegras' move inside to center from the wing post-Olympic break was promising. The 25-year-old closed out the regular season with six goals, 18 points, and a plus-7 rating through the Flyers' last 25 games, and looked increasingly comfortable with driving the puck through the middle as the Flyers were patching together their run. Then in the playoffs, he produced six more points across the Flyers 10 games there, which included that explosive power-play goal in Game 3 against the Penguins that nearly blew the roof off Xfinity Mobile Arena.
He has the skill and the awareness to stick as a center in the top six, but if he does, Zegras will have to improve on his faceoffs, since he carried a low 33.5 win percentage down the stretch, and then a 44.0 rate in the postseason.
Couturier's reinvention of himself into an aggressive and more willingly physical checker, along with Christian Dvorak's steady, if not understated, two-way play and Noah Cates' dependable defense before his injury, were reassuring.
Then there was Barkey's move into the faceoff dot for the Carolina series, which for Game 2, had him centering fellow rookies Porter Martone and Alex Bump, where none of them were older than 22.
That might have been eye-opening.
Denver Barkey held his own playing center against the Hurricanes.
The 21-year-old Barkey had moved in and out at center before during his junior career with the OHL's London Knights, but to slot him in at center against the top-seeded Hurricanes in the playoffs after only being in the NHL for a few months, as a winger, was to effectively throw him into the deep end.
And yet, he held his own with a hard-skating motor and some heads-up playmaking that did generate a few chances, even if it didn't end up yielding any goals against Carolina.
Still, that sample size did leave the Flyers with enough to have to think about what position Barkey will actually play next season.
"When I threw him in there, I wasn't quite sure what you were gonna get," head coach Rick Tocchet said on Wednesday. "I think he handled himself really well. Is it good the guy can play both? Absolutely. To have that hybrid guy who could play either wing [or center], that's a luxury.
"Do I really want to screw around with a kid, bounce him around, left wing, center, every other night? No. I don't think that's healthy for him, so do we have to make a decision on it? I don't think [it's] where it's gotta be like tomorrow that we're gonna do it. But I would like to give him a little bit of a heads up."
But the one Barkey ended up giving the Flyers on the ice this past week may have just made their center situation a bit easier to manage now, and that's before you even get to the prospect pipeline, where Jack Berglund finished the year with the Phantoms in the AHL after massively improving his stock, and where Jett Luchanko and Jack Nesbitt are still keeping themselves in the future mix, at least for now.
But center, just as it's been for the past several years, is still a position of need.
The Flyers still need a true No. 1 somehow, even though there's no immediately direct way to one for them – at least not yet.
But the outlook down the middle is certainly a lot more manageable now than it was.
The strides that Zegras, Couturier, Dvorak, Cates, and then Barkey made this season did a lot for that.
A couple quick notes to wrap...
• Goaltender Aleksei Kolosov re-signed with the Flyers on a one-year, $850,000 deal. The 24-year-old spent nearly all of this past season in the AHL with the Phantoms, and the likelihood is that he'll stay there in Allentown for most of next year, too.
Ersson is a restricted free agent who said he would like to stay in Philadelphia, and Vladar is in play for a contract extension after he definitively proved himself as the Flyers' No. 1 goalie. Kolosov has settled down a bit after a tumultuous and rumor-filled 2024-25 season, but still hasn't shown nearly steady enough to be a possible successor to either of the current NHL-rostered netminders.
So he should fill out the Phantoms' tandem alongside prospect Carson Bjanarson, while the organization waits to get their other progressing goaltending prospect, Yegor Zavragin, in from Russia.
• Porter Martone will skate for Canada in the IIHF World Championship, and Berglund and Carl Grundstrom will play for Sweden as the Flyers' representatives in the annual late-spring international tournament.
Martone, when he spoke in Voorhees on Tuesday, seemed pretty eager to get the extra ice time in. Last year, Worlds proved pretty valuable to the Flyers, since Travis Konecny and Travis Sanheim went in the hopes of securing Olympic spots on Team Canada, which led both to play with Martone as a junior prospect.
A month later, Martone was getting drafted by the Flyers sixth overall, and mid-season, Sanheim had made Team Canada to go to the Olympics.
More often than not, though, Worlds is usually a time for pros who either didn't make the playoffs or got bumped out of them early enough to get some extra games in, and that appears to be the case this spring.
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