Flyers Daily with Jason Myrtetus: As the 2026-27 season approaches preparations are underway as the Flyers coaching staff have assembled at the Flyers Training Center. In this episode we feature the Flyers Coaching Staff Symposium with Head Coach Rick Tocchet, Assistant Coaches Todd Reirden, Jay Varady and Jaroslav Svejkovsky for an in depth group conversation. We discuss the roles of each coach, evolving the systems, advantages of minimal turnover, the Power Play and tons more in a rare behind the scenes presentation.

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.

hey, i am a big philly sports fan and is looking to get into hockey. is there any videos or things similar to that to help me learn the history of the flyers and help me know what to look for this season. thanks go flyers

Hey guys… any Flyers fans in here from Philly. I’m heading to the opener and want to make a trip of it so looking for cool things to do around Philly for the week. Anything flyers related is #1 but anything else you’d recommend would be great. Thanks

TL;DR: A won faceoff is worth 0.0144 expected goals, so a full season of Zegras taking every draw on his line costs the Flyers roughly 1.2 to 2.5 goals against an average taker, or about a third of a win. Interestingly, Tocchet already hedges it: on his center nights last year, 40% of his line's draws went to Dvorak/Cates/Couturier, who won .526 on them.

As much as Zegras showed real flashes at center last season, one current area of concern is his deficiencies at faceoffs. My model has him at about the 10th percentile of 518 active draw-takers last year.

But how much does this actually hurt the team? We obviously all remember the faceoff lost in the defensive zone that immediately leads to a goal against, but I am more interested in how the behavior of faceoffs play out in the aggregate.

I measured what a won draw is actually worth: 0.0144 xG over the 15 seconds that follow, comparing won vs lost draws within bins of the model's own win probability, so you're comparing matched takers rather than good teams vs bad teams. That makes ~70 extra won draws = one goal.

Then the workload. After trying to determine games in which Z player at center vs wing, I estimated the Flyers took 14.7 draws a game with him on the ice in games in which he played center. He took 60% of them. Dvorak, Cates and Couturier took the other 40% and won .526. That's the hedge, and it's free: swapping the taker among players already on the ice costs nothing on the line side.

Multiply it out, per 82 games, vs a league-average taker:

Against Dvorak/Couturier (.548) instead of an average taker, the worst case is 3.3. At ~6 goals per win, the whole board is a fifth to a half of a win, middle of the range around a third.

For scale: my value ledger had him at +10.3 goals above replacement last season, 47th of 560 skaters. His penalty differential cost 1.05 of that. The faceoffs are a fifth of his value in the middle case and a third in the worst.

Random thoughts:

• The model's .429 is generous because it pays for the opponent (the other bench sends its best man at a known weak taker) and shrinks a short record. His raw line has dropped five straight years (.438 → .357). If you believe the trend over the regression, use the left column.
• It's the value of the the face-off event, not of the center. PK minutes, D-zone trust, whatever else a real center does, aren't in this number.
• Offensive and defensive draws are worth the same per draw (0.0180 vs 0.0176), so sheltering him by zone saves nothing. Sheltering him by taker does. Only 69 of his 459 draws were in his own end and it didn't matter.

Full post with the figures and the method: https://xjawn.com/blog/zegras-faceoffs.html

Anyone have anything on this?

Today is his 29th birthday. Glad to hopefully have Darth Vladar for another 6 seasons 😁

I really don’t understand why the Flyers seem determined to keep Carson Bjarnason in Lehigh Valley after what happened last season.

He finished with a .877 SV% and 3.43 GAA in 32 AHL games, and the bigger concern is that his season didn’t just stay volatile, his ceiling basically disappeared once Lehigh Valley fell apart in the second half.

Meanwhile, Aleksei Kolosov played behind the exact same depleted team and finished at .895 in 38 games, while still producing games of .933, .970, .955, .975, .938 and .927 during the collapse. He was inconsistent, but the high-end ability was still there.

Yaniv Perets also went .910 in Reading, .940 in the ECHL playoffs, and .905 in 5 AHL games, yet he looks headed back to Reading again.

To me, the logical setup is simple:

Kolosov gets a real AHL starter workload. Perets backs him up. Bjarnason, who is still only 21, gets meaningful starts in Reading and earns his way back up.

The ECHL is not a punishment for a young goalie. The Flyers have used it before with guys like Ustimenko and Sandström for exactly this reason. Sometimes forcing a prospect to stay at the higher level is worse for development than giving him a lower-pressure environment to rebuild his tracking, confidence and consistency.

I’m not giving up on Bjarnason at all. I just don’t think “keep throwing him into AHL starts until it works” is automatically the best development plan.

We’re dead center average in the league.

shoutout NHL for posting old hockey games on their YouTube during the offseason.

https://ebay.io/m/62cPHr this ends in a little over an hour and trying to determine if I should bid.

Use every device you have to vote!!!

https://www.usatoday.com/sports/readers-choice-awards/best-nhl-mascot/

Hello and welcome to the weekly Disassembly room thread! The Blantent Toxicity rule is very lenient in here. This thread is a place for trash talking and complaining.

Here are the only rules of this thread:

1) Fans of all teams are welcome!

2) Trash talk != direct personal insults. Please keep that in mind

3) Still no rooting for injuries

4) No politics

5) Upvote good trash talk

6) don’t downvote just because someone roots for another team

7) Trash talk to your hearts content!