O'Connor: Quiet offseason not a disaster for Flyers, but it was a missed opportunity

When Philadelphia Flyers general manager Daniel Briere spoke with the media on July 1, he helpfully provided a likely endpoint for the active portion of the club’s offseason.

“We’re having some discussions with a few teams on a few different things,” he began. “If that doesn’t happen in the next week, there’s a good chance that yeah, what you see is what will be at training camp.”

Well, it’s now eight days later. And with the dust settling on the NHL offseason and both signing and trade activity slowing to a crawl, it’s very plausible that Briere and the Flyers are indeed done.

So what exactly did Briere do? Not much.

He re-signed his pending restricted free agents (namely Bobby Brink and Egor Zamula) to short-term, predictable contracts. He bought out Cam Atkinson to clear cap space and a roster spot at right wing, while giving the respected veteran a chance to catch on elsewhere (he signed with Tampa Bay). He re-signed Erik Johnson to a cheap, one-year contract to serve as the team’s seventh defenseman/blueline mentor. He gave two more contract years to a (very good) fourth liner which will keep him with the club until after he turns 35. He had a relatively uneventful draft, most notable for the fact that he reached slightly relative to public draft rankings on his earlier first round pick, and then traded his second first rounder for a Round 1 pick next year.

If it’s now over, Daniel Briere didn’t exactly have an eye-catching, transaction-heavy big-splash summer.

OK, there was one enormous move left out of that paragraph: Briere brought Matvei Michkov over to the NHL, undeniably a huge organizational win. It will likely be years (if ever) before the public learns just how big of a role the Flyers played in facilitating the termination of the final two years of his KHL contract — whether the Flyers were driving events, were mere passive beneficiaries of events totally out of their control, or somewhere in the middle.

But at the very least, Briere and the Philadelphia front office didn’t mess things up. They kept up a not-adversarial relationship with SKA St. Petersburg (Michkov’s club) and avoided ruffling any feathers that could have torpedoed the termination. That’s important, and warrants praise. The Michkov situation was by far the Flyers’ biggest win of the offseason, and shouldn’t be ignored or discounted just because Briere publicly downplayed the Flyers’ role in making it happen. It’s a massive boost to the organization, both in terms of justifying their gamble at the 2023 draft, and adding the kind of sky-high upside player that the NHL club currently lacks.

But Michkov alone won’t be enough to return the Flyers to Stanley Cup contention, even if he fully lives up to his advance billing.

Take a look at their current roster. Travis Konecny is the Flyers’ best player at the moment, and he doesn’t even appear to be in realistic contention to make Team Canada’s roster for the upcoming Four Nations tournament in 2025, if the public projections are any indication. After Konecny, the Flyers have a number of good players, but none anywhere near great, at least not yet or (in Sean Couturier’s case) not anymore. Perhaps first rounder Jett Luchanko can be the 1C the Flyers don’t have right now, but that will take years, and is a longshot given how difficult it is to unearth first-line centers in the draft, especially outside the top-10. They have a low-key deep blueline corps and prospect pipeline at the position, but no player who screams “potential big-minutes dominant No. 1.”

Michkov may indeed prove to be amazing. But true contenders don’t just have one great player. Edmonton has Connor McDavid — and Leon Draisaitl, and Evan Bouchard, and Zach Hyman. Florida can boast Aleksander Barkov — in addition to Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Reinhart, Gustav Forsling, and Aaron Ekblad. It’s the same with Dallas and Miro Heiskanen, and Colorado with Nathan MacKinnon, and New York with Igor Shesterkin. All flashy, impact stars, and all with lesser flashy impact stars to support them.

Right now, the Flyers — with the possible exception of Konecny — don’t have that for Michkov, on the NHL roster or as sure-things in the pipeline.

In their defense, they know it.

By all accounts — including Briere’s own post-Round 1 admission — the Flyers aggressively attempted to move up into the top-10 of the draft two weeks ago, to secure a player who they thought more likely to be a star than Luchanko. Based on reports and rumors, they’ve checked in on basically every U25 blue-chipper rumored to be available. They know what they need, and they tried to get it this summer.

They just didn’t pull it off.

And again in their defense, they don’t truly have to pull it off just yet. Briere made it clear in the lead-up to the draft that due to the club’s tight salary cap situation — the result of rebuilding-focused stockpiling of assets that added lots of dead money to their books — they’re not really looking to “turn the corner” and attack free agency until 2025 at the earliest, and most likely not before 2026. The 2024-25 season was never going to be a season they targeted for Cup contention — after all, teams with nearly $22 million in dead money on their books don’t contend. The upcoming season can be used as an evaluation/development year for Michkov and the not-insignificant number of young-ish players on the NHL roster with high plausible upside.

It’s not going to kill the rebuild if Matvei Michkov spends his rookie year getting feeds from Morgan Frost or Sean Couturier instead of Trevor Zegras. He’ll survive.

It’s not that largely punting on the 2024 offseason will make it impossible for Briere and the Flyers to ultimately get what they need. It just makes it harder, given that one offseason has now largely passed, and no clear-cut solutions to the organization’s big long-term roster questions have yet emerged.

The tough part to swallow is that it very much appeared that opportunities existed. There were the trade-up attempts, which were so heavily rumored it’s hard to blame fans — particularly online-centric ones — for getting their hopes up. There were two teams in Buffalo and Ottawa obviously desperate after disappointing years who looked poised to make dumb moves — and both did, in the form of an underwhelming return for Jakob Chychrun and a trade of the 2022 9th overall pick for a 3C.

Maybe a trade-up was never possible, given the historical cap-era reticence to trade away top-10 picks. Maybe those specific moves couldn’t have happened for the Flyers; Chychrun in particular made little sense for them. But the stage was set for Briere and the Flyers to be beneficiaries of desperate front offices or to tap into their stockpiled draft picks for a better shot at a star, and they were unable to take advantage.

No matter which way you slice it, they stand as missed opportunities for the kind of action that at some point, the Flyers are going to have to take if they want this rebuild to work, given their unwillingness to execute on the kind of scorched-earth plan that would guarantee an infusion of blue-chip top-5 picks into the organization. And assuming they are largely finished for the summer, the entire offseason can be viewed through that lens as a missed opportunity — especially given their apparent timeline for projected contention.

Which brings us to Travis Konecny.

Briere and the Flyers have made it clear that they want to re-sign Konecny, preferably by the end of this summer, so that the specter of his looming UFA status in the summer of 2025 doesn’t loom over his entire season. Had the Flyers done the opposite — revealed publicly or through strategic leaks that Konecny was available to the highest bidder — it would have sent the message to the fanbase that the front office very much still views this as a long-term, future-focused rebuild.

But their openness to re-signing Konecny to a big-money, long-term deal that kicks in at age 28 implies that the Flyers believe that they can turn the corner relatively quickly. After all, the logic of signing a very-good-but-not-elite player to a huge cap hit over seven or eight seasons through his mid-30s is simple: Yes, the final few years of the deal are likely to be overpays, because the aging curve comes for every player. But the team will get real value in the front half of the contract, while the player is still operating at close-to-peak powers.

For the Flyers to get that value, however, they need to be ready for a move into playoff relevancy by 2025-26 (the first season of a new Konecny deal) or soon after. In other words, unless the Flyers are absolutely convinced that Konecny’s early-to-mid thirties will mirror those of Brad Marchand, re-signing him is inherently a “win-now” move, or at least a “win in the near future” move. Which doesn’t line up with largely sitting out this entire offseason.

If the Flyers’ plan is to chug along, stockpile assets and draft lots of intriguing prospects for 4-5 years in a slow-and-steady, painstaking process, figuring that the rebuild finally “ends” when Michkov hits his prime around age 24, that’s a totally reasonable plan. It’s one I suspect fans would be more open to accepting than perhaps even the organization realizes.

But that plan can’t include re-signing Travis Konecny. The dropoff risk in the back half of the deal is simply too high.

So re-signing Konecny only makes sense if Briere and the Flyers will soon (say, by the 2026 offseason) be adding the kind of high-end talent that this team — even with Michkov and Konecny — is going to need in order to truly contend.

And now, there’s one fewer offseason that Briere and Co. has left to do it.

The result is that now, the 2025 offseason looms extremely large for the entire Flyers organization, as a potential pivot point for their entire plan.

Their ridiculous amount of stockpiled draft capital says as much: three first round picks and three second round picks, in a draft that internally, the Flyers believe to be loaded at the top.

“According to our scouts, next year is a really, really good draft. Really top-heavy,” Briere reiterated on July 1.

Their actions over the past seven months back up their public statements. They nabbed a 2025 second rounder in the Cutter Gauthier/Jamie Drysdale trade, prioritized a 2025 first over a 2024 one in the Sean Walker deal, and then turned the 32nd pick this year into yet another 2025 first on draft day.

Briere is clearly putting a lot of eggs into the 2025 NHL Draft basket. And whether he makes all of those selections to dramatically beef up the pipeline, or uses the excitement surrounding the strong class to convince other GMs to make big trades with him using those picks as chips, it’s setting up to be the key to his rebuilding strategy.

“I can’t wait to be sitting there next year and take advantage of (the extra picks),” he acknowledged.

It doesn’t feel like an overstatement to say that now, given their relatively inactive past two weeks and the mass stockpiling of picks for next summer, the 2025 draft and that offseason as a whole will dictate the success of the Flyers’ rebuild, at least under this leadership group.

And that’s a lot of pressure to be placed upon one single offseason of work.

That said, Briere’s patient, quiet 2024 summer may very well prove justified. If a few of the young-ish roster players take big steps forward in 2024-25, for example, it would change the public perception of their needs. They may lack high-end talent now, yes. But all of Owen Tippett, Cam York, Tyson Foerster, Jamie Drysdale and Joel Farabee have flashed the ability to at least reach Konecny-esque levels of production and value. If even one or two of them take “the leap” this upcoming season, suddenly the NHL roster no longer looks nearly as bereft of impact contributors. And given the fact that those are the players who Briere likely would have needed to relinquish in a 2024 “big splash” trade, it would vindicate his approach even more if they break out in Philadelphia rather than elsewhere.

He’ll also be vindicated if he does indeed nail the now-pivotal 2025 offseason. Then, largely sitting out this summer will play in retrospect as shrewd calculation, as an unwillingness to waste his bullets until the just right trade involving just the right player emerged.

But in the here and now, we don’t have the benefit of future sight. In the here and now, the Flyers still have an organizational talent pool that — even with Michkov officially in the fold — doesn’t appear likely to produce the kind of roster capable of contending for Stanley Cups anytime in the near future.

Hope must now be pinned on significant internal development, a massive 2025 draft haul, or Briere and the front office proving able to get the big wins in the trade market that they couldn’t secure this summer.

That’s far from impossible. The rebuild is not certain to fail.

But assuming Briere does indeed remain quiet over the remainder of this offseason, the degree of difficulty just went up a few more notches.