Welcome to Broad Street Hockey’s Summer 2025 Top Under 25! The series is back and with the Philadelphia Flyers focusing so much on the future, it’s more important than ever. Join us as we rank the 25 best players under the age of 25 for the next few weeks.
No. 21: Helge Grans
2024-25 Primary League/Team: Lehigh Valley Phantoms (AHL)
2024-25 Statistics: 8 G, 15 A in 66 GP
Age as of 9/15/2025: 13 (5/10/2002)
Acquired Via: 2020 NHL Draft – Round 2, Pick 35
The run of defensemen continues as we go from Amico to a more experienced defensive prospect in Helge Grans, who stepped up nicely in his second season with the Phantoms in the AHL. As he continues to get his game on track and moving in the right direction, he brought a level of pop that we hadn’t seen from him in his first season with the team — he increased his goal scoring total from one to eight this season, and his points from eight to 23 across 66 regular season games, and came up with a huge series winning goal against Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in the play-in round in the spring. It’s a nice upward trajectory he’s found, and this season will be an interesting one, to see where he goes next.
How did Grans’s 2024-25 season go? Is his stock trending up or down from where it was entering the year?
After something of a middling first season in the organization after being brought in as part of the trade return for Ivan Provorov, this past season was gearing up to a bit of a make or break season for Grans, a chance for him to take a big step forward and carve out a role for himself in this new organization before some of the younger prospects are ready to turn pro and start breathing down his neck. And, to his credit, he took that opportunity and ran with it. Now a little more settled with his new team, things came together nicely in Grans’s game in his second season with the Phantoms — he looked more decisive on the defensive side, he was working well as a breakout generator, and he even unlocked a level of offense unseen from him since his rookie season in the league (in the year where rosters were depleted by taxi squads, mind you). His play wasn’t positively mistake free — though we’re willing to write some of that off along with the context that the whole of the Phantoms’ defense struggled at times with the structure they were intended to run — but he polished his game out nicely, and earned himself that call-up to the NHL, and proved that he could hang reasonably well at that level as well. His development, all in all, is nicely back on track and he’s not far at all away from making a push for a more full-time NHL job.
What are we expecting from Grans this season? What should we be looking for from him?
This year should be a big one for Grans. He’s set to be in the mix for a job with the Flyers to start the season — potentially as a replacement for Rasmus Ristolainen as he works back from injury, potentially over the longer term as the seventh defenseman — and he could well be moving into the next phase in his career, legitimately pushing for an NHL job. A nice little boost could be coming his way in that regard, but if things don’t quite break his way in training camp and he finds himself back with the Phantoms again, he should be set to earn a big role down there. With four years of experience in the league and some NHL experience in the back pocket as well, Grans will be relied upon to step up as something of a veteran presence, while also continuing to be leaned on as someone who can take a high volume of difficult minutes in stride. The hope is that he can continue to mature his game and excel in the Phantoms’ new system, but he’s done well already to get close at least to having mastered this level.
How does Grans fit in the Flyers’ rebuild? Is it likely he’s going to be part of the next good Flyers team?
Grans is in, to say the least, something of an interesting position. Between the work he’s put in over this past year to really mature his game, plus a reasonably strong showing across seven games in the NHL last season as a bit of a debut, he’s right there in line to contend for a spot with the NHL team as we head into training camp (and the Ristolainen injury certainly opens the door even wider for him to take a run at that). And there’s certainly some real value to what he offers the team with his skillset, as a right shooting defenseman with some good size, good mobility, and positive puck moving ability, even if he doesn’t play that highly coveted physical style. It’s easy to see why the organization might see him as a better short-term fit to fill the Ristolainen void (over someone like Emil Andrae who doesn’t address the size question in that same way), but also why they might see some bigger picture value to him as an organizational piece.
But the question of that long term fit is a slippery one. There’s a lot in Grans’s profile that makes him seem like an interesting option to help fill out the bottom of the defense lineup as they move up the next group of young players, but that defense group down in the pipeline is a crowded one, and there are players in that mix who offer a bit more than him in some areas — more physicality, or more dynamic offensive upside, for example — so Grans will have to put in a lot of work to make his case that the sum of the parts of his game is enough to let him stick over some of those other players who bring a little more flash in one of those parts of their games, lest he get lost in the shuffle.
What do we think Grans’s ultimate NHL upside is, and how likely is it that he gets to something approaching that?
While Grans is still young and does still have some developmental runway ahead of him, at this point, it seems like his projection more or less is what it is. That is, we expect Grans to be in the running for a spot on the Flyers’ third pair as soon as this training camp coming up, and while he has the skills to play up a pair in a big pinch, something of that third pair depth option is where is realistic projection pretty much maxes out. There’s still some room for fine tuning in his game and for getting more assertive in his defensive zone coverages, and we expect him to make strides here in this next season, but even those improvements will keep him in the same projection zone, if only making it more solid. Though his four seasons in North America have been a bit up and down at times, they’ve also served as a very good developmental incubator, getting him to where he is now and just about as finished of a product as the organization would hope to see.
Previously in Philadelphia Flyers Summer 2025 Top 25 Under 25: