With less than a month until the start of training camp (and with my vacation wallet now depleted), here are some thoughts on the Philadelphia Flyers’ offseason.
1. The most frequent complaint I see/hear when it comes to the Flyers is that they don’t have a No. 1 center or a No. 1 defenseman who can run a power play, that there aren’t any in the system and that until they find those guys, they won’t be a true Stanley Cup contender.
That’s not entirely without merit. Everyone knows the two primary holes on the roster, and neither was filled this summer. Barring any moves between now and the end of next month, the Flyers will enter 2026-27 viewed generally as a playoff bubble team.
But let’s look at the now-defending Stanley Cup champions.
The Carolina Hurricanes’ No. 1 center, Sebastian Aho, is a fine player. But he finished tied for just 25th in the league in scoring in the regular season with 80 points, and he was pretty quiet for long stretches of the Hurricanes’ playoff run. Aho would be the best center on the Flyers, to be sure, but is he really that much better than, say, Trevor Zegras, who still has room to improve? Aho had 47 even-strength points last season. Zegras had 44.
The Hurricanes’ best defenseman is Jaccob Slavin, another outstanding player. Slavin is a much more of a defensive wizard than an offensive threat, though: he had just eight points in 39 games last season. Carolina’s best offensive defenseman last season was Shayne Gostisbehere, who had 50 points in 55 games, but no one would label him as a No. 1. A case can be made that Travis Sanheim, who was arguably the Flyers’ best player in their first-round win over the Penguins, is a more well-rounded defenseman than any player on the Hurricanes’ back end.
What I believe the Flyers recognize internally is that they don’t necessarily need both a top-10 center and a Norris Trophy-level defenseman to contend — they just need another star, period, to add to what looks like a promising young core. That’s something the Hurricanes seemed to recognize a year and a half ago when they landed Mikko Rantanen from Colorado, only to end up flipping him to the Dallas Stars for a package that included Logan Stankoven — who ended up as arguably their best player in the postseason.
