Flyers' Turn Their Sights onto Next Season

When the Philadelphia Flyers made a mid-season hire, bringing in new general manager Eric Wolf into the fold, the Flyers sat in the midst of a wildcard hunt with a 22-16-4 record. The team was no more short of the term 'mediocrity'. Now as we edge closer to the deadline, the Flyers find themselves with a 28-30-6 record. Only 6 wins, and a whopping 16 losses during Wolf's tenure so far. The Flyers have slipped too far of any wildcard contention they were in, but according to the GM, there is no surprise and was somewhat the intention. 

"As stated before, it is always tough to come into a team mid-season. After a few weeks on the job, it became quite evident to me that the current make-up of the roster did not have the depth, or the skill needed on the back-end for any realistic playoff run. We've decided to do a bit of a 'reset' this season to put us in a more favourable position next season." 

The Flyers intentions seem evident, as they decided to trade formidable roster players from their team such as Kevin Hayes to Nashville for a pick and a prospect, Duncan Keith to Dallas for a pick and Julius Honka, Cal Clutterbuck and pick(s) to Vegas for Luke Kunin, and Mark Pysyk and pick(s) to Los Angeles for Alex Barrie-Boulet and pick(s).

"I consider all of these deals 'house cleaning deals'." Wolf admitted. "We dealt some good players, but they were all either pending UFA or were earning an incredibly high salary. We cleared about 20 mil in cap with these deals, while recouping useable cost controlled roster players such as Kunin and Barrie-Boulet that will play for us next season and beyond. We aren't winning anything this year, so being able to begin laying the building blocks for next season is a win in our books right now." 

In another house-cleaning move, the Philadelphia Flyers released the rights to 14 prospects, all of whom were in their 30's, defected to Europe, or were already straight up retired. "I don't really know what happened here in Philadelphia before I arrived, but it appears there was nobody doing anything here. Like I straight up had to clean cobwebs from the corner of my office. We had guys like retired Andrew MacDonald and David Schlemko still on our prospect list. It was crazy. We decided to release the rights to 14 different players who were never ever going to sniff an NHL game in their life time." That leaves the Flyers down to a leagues worst - 5 prospects on their protected rights list. "This is a huge concern of ours. We are going to allocate a lot of efforts on rebuilding and replenishing our youth and prospects this summer."

So as it appears, the Flyers have clearly steered their franchise in the direction of a rebuild since Wolf's hiring, but make no mistake, they anticipate a quicker rebuild than usual. "We don't really have any more assets to sell, at least no options that would end up hurting our current team. We have elite level talent in Huberdeau and Hertl leading the charge, my focus now is to build around them. But for as long as we have the pieces we do have in play, I feel like it puts us ahead of the curb and helps us skip a few steps in what one would classify as a rebuild. We're going to push the envelope on getting competitive as early as this off-season if everything goes according to plan we have in place."