The Philadelphia Flyers had a miserable 2024-25 season. That’s nothing new to anyone reading this website. They finished fourth-last in the entire league standings and now we’re just here waiting for the draft lottery in a week or so to think about what prospect we could put all of our collective hope into.
They might not have finished at the top of any standings or even at the top in a team-wide statistic — they were more commonly at the bottom of the league once again in key categories like power play success and save percentage, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. There was something the Flyers were very good at this year, though. Rather, some individual Flyers were very good at and at the top of the NHL.
Going fast.
With the regular season wrapped up, all the numbers can be calculated to get some sort of 82-game total with every skater with roughly the same sample size. Specifically, for the NHL Edge tracking data, it gives us a peek at which player moved around the most and who went the fastest on the ice this season.
The leaderboards just so happen to include a couple of Philadelphia Flyers.
Unsurprisingly, Owen Tippett’s name popped up a fair bit. In a neatly organized list thanks to JFresh on Twitter, Tippett placed in all three major categories when it came to going fast as heck on the ice. His top sustained speed of 23.9 miles per hour ranked 10th highest in the league this season; an average of 14.2 speed bursts going over 20 miles per hour per 60 minutes, ranked 11th; and his average of 1.9 speed bursts going over 22 miles per hour per 60 minutes, was all the way up at fifth.
The only names that consistently ranked above Tippett in these categories are players like Winnipeg Jets’ Rasmus Kupari, Colorado Avalanche duo of Nathan MacKinnon and Martin Necas, and of course Connor McDavid. Tippett is right up there in the top movers in the entire NHL. And even Ryan Poehling got in on the fun, ranking eighth overall with his average of 1.5 speed bursts of over 22 miles per hour per 60 minutes; and placing 19th in speed bursts over 20 miles per hour per 60 with an average of 12.1.
But it wasn’t just a couple Flyers forwards who were moving around at league-best speeds this season. Some defensemen were speedy, too. Thanks to yet another well-organized list, we can clearly see that a couple of Flyers blueliners had their names in the same categories.
Naturally, Jamie Drysdale featured in all three categories. The young Flyers blueliner’s top sustained speed of 23.3 miles per hour had him ranked 14th in the league. Additionally, he averaged the most speed bursts of over 18 miles per hour per 60 minutes, among all NHL defensemen this season with 25.4. Every single regular defensemen in the best league in the world and Drysdale skated that fast the most. And when it comes to speed bursts over 20 miles per hour, the Flyers blueliner finished third in the NHL with 5.3 per 60 minutes.
Again, just like Tippett, the only other names that placed with any regularity alongside Drysdale were defensemen with such high reputations like Cale Makar and Jake Sanderson. But it wasn’t even just Drysdale, the Flyers workhorse known as Travis Sanheim also had his name on these leaderboards. The 29-year-old blueliner averaged 19.7 speed bursts over 18 miles per hour per 60 minutes (17th in NHL), and 3.7 speed bursts over 20 miles per hour per 60 minutes (15th in NHL). Considering just how many minutes Sanheim had to play this season as the Flyers’ top defenseman, going that fast that often is even more impressive.
If all four of these Flyers are with the team next season, you have to imagine that their names will remain on this list and they would still finish as some of the fastest movers in the league.