June 30, 2025
Nick Tricome/PhillyVoice
Flyers general manager Danny Brière speaks to the media at the team's NHL Draft HQ in Atlantic City after the first round concluded on Friday night.
There was a calm through the hallways of the Atlantic City Hard Rock on Sunday morning, and an open door to one of the ballrooms that showed the Philadelphia Flyers' makeshift war room getting disassembled.
The rush, for now, was over.
The Flyers, in the decentralized 2025 NHL Draft this past weekend, made another crucial run of picks for their rebuild, putting together a prospect haul that made the plan that general manager Danny Brière has stressed numerous times in the past year just a bit clearer.
Highlighted by star wing prospect Porter Martone as the sixth overall pick and high-upside center Jack Nesbitt in a trade up with Pittsburgh to the No. 12 spot, the Flyers' future outlook got a whole lot bigger, meaner, and universally more competitive in terms of work ethic within just a 24-hour span.
Of course, they got more skill, which they always needed, but Friday night's first round into Saturday's rounds 2-7 made it evident that the organization wanted its development pool to get tougher.
Both Brière and assistant general manager Brent Flahr chalked it up to coincidence that all but two of their nine draft picks this weekend measured in at above six feet tall.
However, they both knew and outright said before the draft that they were aware the Flyers had become an undersized group, which not long after, was followed by a fierce and strong Florida Panthers team winning its second straight Stanley Cup title.
It's not enough to just be talented in the NHL, you have to be strong.
"You watch the playoffs," Flahr said after the Flyers' work on Day 2 of the draft wrapped Saturday. "It's a grind. To be able to get into the NHL, you have to have a tremendous work ethic, then to be able to have success in it, you have to have that side of it. So, the guys we drafted, as part of what [head coach Rick Tocchet] wants, as part of what [president of hockey ops Keith Jones] and Danny want, we want competitive people and I think we did a pretty good job of that."
It'll be a few years before the Flyers can really see the payoff, though – anywhere from 3-5 years, especially for a slow-building center pipeline, Brière mentioned the night prior following the conclusion of the first round.
It's a process, still very much a rebuild, and with the steps taken this weekend, a means to keep up with or even eventually get ahead of a league that, inevitably, always champions physicality.
The reigning champion Panthers are the face of that now. Once upon a time, the Flyers were, too.
And maybe they can be again with who they've brought in and what they're trying to do, as Keith Jones put pretty succinctly when Nesbitt walked up to the draft stage in LA with his new hat and jersey, then to the monitor toward the back with Philly's front office regime awaiting on a video call.
"Well, he looks like a Flyer to me," Jones said of their newest center.
Size and skill.
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) June 28, 2025
6'5" center Jack Nesbitt already looks like a Flyer. pic.twitter.com/eyxrZTtisd
Brière, in his explanation for why the Flyers traded up to take Nesbitt at 12, admitted that the 18-year-old likely has a longer development timeline ahead of him and that the organization would have to be patient with that.
That said, Brière also noted that the Flyers saw him make a lot of progress in the second half of the junior season at Windsor while scouting him, which led to them really buying into his upside – and they didn't seem to be the only team on the board buying in either, which necessitated the move up.
"I think he's going to be a pretty special player, and has the chance to be maybe even as high as the top six or a second-line center," Brière said Friday night. "If he hits as a second-line center, it's going to be a huge asset down the road for us."
But, again, down the road, Brière said, is looking at 3-5 years.
The Flyers' center outlook is looking a bit better after this weekend, but it's still a hole in the roster that's going to take a long time to sufficiently fill.
Here's a look at where it stands both at the NHL level (and just below it) and in the system going back the past three drafts:
| NHL/AHL | Prospects |
| Sean Couturier | Jack Nesbitt (25) |
| Noah Cates | Matthew Gard (25) |
| Trevor Zegras | Nathan Quinn (25) |
| Rodrigo Abols | Jett Luchanko (24) |
| Karsen Dorwart | Jack Berglund (24) |
| Heikki Ruohonen (24) | |
| Denver Barkey (23) | |
| Cole Knuble (23) | |
| Ryan MacPherson (23) |
(Draft year in parentheses)
The bolded prospect names above are the ones Brière specifically called out as a part of building up the organization's center depth over the weekend, but as you might be able to tell, there's no true game-changer there yet.
There's a lot to be desired there at the NHL level right now, but the trade for Trevor Zegras early last week is a low-cost dice roll on potentially uncovering a top-six center who is still relatively young, and affordable under the salary cap, at 24.
In the system, there's a lot of promise in Jett Luchanko's skating and maturity in his game at a very young age, but the training camp coming up will be the show of whether he's progressed enough to be a full-time NHLer after he at least earned that nine-game junior trial at the start of last season.
Then with Nesbitt, again, there's a lot of upside that the Flyers see there, but in the sense it seems to be a dependable and productive lineup piece for potentially years to come, though maybe not as a true irrefutable star.
Martone, as a right winger and the Flyers' top pick this year, appears to have all the tools to be one along the wall, but down the middle, the Flyers might still be searching.
Staying on Nesbitt, and the means through which the Flyers got him: They traded the 22nd and 31st picks to the Pittsburgh Penguins – you know, their biggest rival – to jump up to 12... and the Penguins accepted that deal, too.
That's a real sign of the times, and a bit of a dreary one at that.
Pretty much from the height of the Sidney Crosby era, when the late 2000s and early 2010s Flyers were constantly trading blows with the Pens, and even after into the mid-late 2010s when the Flyers were in their fall into mediocrity, there was hardly ever a chance they would make a deal with Pittsburgh, or not directly that is.
Mark Streit, a Flyer, did get traded to the Penguins in 2017, but that required the Tampa Bay Lightning basically stepping in to play facilitator so there'd be no official transaction between the two.
The Flyers got Val Filppula and a couple late-round picks from Tampa for that, and Streit was a Bolt for about five seconds before he got flipped to Pittsburgh for another late-round pick.
Now, the Flyers aren't good, but they're young and trying to build back up.
The Penguins, they ran into a wall and have been coming to grips with the fact that they have to rebuild now, too. They're old, their prospect cupboard was pretty bare, Crosby alone can't drag them to at least a first-round playoff run anymore, and now there's thought – not concrete rumors, mind you, but thought – that he could possibly play somewhere else before his career wraps.
This rivalry is in pieces right now.
Free agency opens Tuesday at noon ET.
The Flyers finally have some money to spend in the range of $15 million, per PuckPedia, and Brière has said that the team is moving into a phase where he'll be looking to add to it at the NHL level rather than subtract from it.
Expectations should stay tempered, though.
Yes, the Flyers can spend, but they'll have even more cash freeing up next summer in 2026, which has long been believed to be when they'll really go spending.
They might make a couple of short-term depth signings or even trades to bridge the gap to prospects on Tuesday, but the likelihood is that the Flyers won't go much further beyond that.
They also still, currently, have their two remaining restricted free agents to deal with in defenseman Cam York and winger Jakob Pelletier. They appear to be getting there on a contract with York, per The Athletic's Kevin Kurz, who also, somewhat curiously, added that they're heading toward not extending a qualifying offer to Pelletier.
York, had a down season, but can still fit as a core defenseman, so the rationale in getting him signed does add up.
Pelletier was part of the return in the Morgan Frost-Joel Farabee trade with Calgary, and while he struggled at first when he got to Philadelphia, he did find a groove after former coach John Tortorella was fired and is only 24.
Maybe a path's getting cleared for another prospect, or a signing.
UPDATE [5:24 p.m.] – The Flyers announced their qualifying offers. York received one to keep his RFA negotiating rights exclusive. Pelletier and prospects Elliot Desnoyers and Zayde Wisdom did not, making them unrestricted free agents.
Russian KHL star Maxim Shabanov is looking to make a jump to the NHL, and there have been rumors linking the forward to the Flyers for a good month or so now.
Max Shabanov is one of a kind.#KHLMoments pic.twitter.com/xN7flQ20S8
— KHL (@khl_eng) June 29, 2025
The Flyers could also be on the lookout for an affordable vet to help instill new coach Rick Tocchet's style on the ice, and Pius Suter, who played and thrived under Tocchet in Vancouver, is available.
Last, they could use an established goalie to pair up with Sam Ersson.
Thatcher Demko was also speculated to be a potential option out of Vancouver in free agency, but word on Monday is that he'll be staying with the Canucks on an extension.
Other goaltenders to keep an eye on, though: Jake Allen, Alexander Georgiev, Vita Vanecek, Ilya Samsonov, and Anton Forsberg.
We'll see what Tuesday brings.
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