The Philadelphia Flyers have a chance to add an incredible number of high-end prospects to their pool at the 2025 NHL Entry Draft later this month. With three first-round picks and four second-round picks that will all be in the first 48 selections, some damage can be done.
With that amount of ammunition heading into a draft, the question of moving up has been brought up. More specifically, Philadelphia owns the 22nd-overall pick, and then picks like the 31st or 32nd overall, or even top-end second-rounders like the 36th and 40th overall selections — that all means they have the right pieces to move up in the first round if they wanted to get a specific prospect.
At the NHL Draft Combine in Buffalo this week, Flyers general manager Danny Briere addressed this possibility and other potential outcomes of the upcoming draft.
“We might like to move up, but it might not make sense,” he said via NHL.com. “We might move to the future. There’s so many possibilities, but we’re also excited to pick where we are. And at the moment, we’re doing the work as if we’re going to pick in those slots.”
Somewhat stating the obvious, the Flyers would only move up if a certain prospect that is high up on their own draft board, drops down to a range where they can feasibly move up into. With so much variability in draft rankings from the seventh, to really the 45th or so ranked prospect — there is just a big blob of players that could go anywhere in that range with very vague tiers — we could see a whole lot of players that the public scouting sphere assumed would go earlier, drop into selections we would never imagine they would be available at.
But another interesting thing that Briere mentioned is moving the pick into the future. Obviously, they have done that before. Just last year, with the 32nd overall pick from the Florida Panthers, they traded it to the Edmonton Oilers in exchange for their 2025 first-round pick. That pick will be 31st or 32nd overall, so they might just push that off another year; to rejuvenate the hope that it will become a better pick as it was when they made the trade last year.
One thing that might be for certain is that the Flyers want to take one of the top centers available with the sixth overall pick. Will that be Anton Frondell? Caleb Desnoyers? James Hagens? We won’t find out until June 27 but Briere knows that it is a position of need and has been addressing it.
“I think for a few years the centers that we drafted have not developed the way we thought,” Briere said. “That’s why, starting last year with drafting Luchanko, Berglund, Ruohonen, kind of put us back on track, but you have to wait for them. We’re also planning on investing a little bit in the center position in this draft, having so many picks.”
Luckily for the Flyers, there are real solid center prospects that should be available in the range their picks lie. Those previous names mentioned for their first pick, maybe someone like Braeden Cootes or Cullen Potter at 22nd overall, and then maybe Eric Nilson, Cole McKinney, William Moore, Ethan Czata, and Ivan Ryabkin, with their collection of other picks in the top 50.
But of course, each team has their own draft board and as we found out last year when they took center Jett Luchanko over some more highly thought of prospects in the public sphere, the Flyers will take their guy. Briere double downed on that sentiment, basically saying that whatever the public draft rankings are do not matter to them one bit.
“We’ve shown in the past that we’re not afraid to take swings,” Briere said. “… We don’t just go with what the outside world thinks. We’re doing our homework, and I really strongly believe in our group of scouts. We don’t get swayed too much by what’s out there. We go with what we feel is the right thing to do from the inside.”
While we might question the selections for the few years until we see the players actually make it to a team that we pay attention to, after a certain point the draft becomes more and more of just taking players that specific teams like. Jack Berglund might not have been in anyone’s first two rounds, but the Flyers took him in the second round and were excited about it. They will stick to their guns and address their needs, no matter what draft-obsessed fans think of their decision.
Will that all work out for them? Again, we’ll find out eventually.
The Flyers have a total of 11 picks in the upcoming 2025 NHL Entry Draft that will take place on June 27 and 28.