The story of the Flyers’ 2025 NHL Entry Draft isn’t quite that it was the 19th anniversary of them drafting a guy named Claude Giroux, it was that hockey TV executives everywhere really must miss the entertainment value of the team’s franchise icon and front office leader forgetting Giroux’s name when announcing the team’s top pick.
If it seems strange to remember that Bobby Clarke moment so many years later, well, it is. But then again so was this first (and, hopefully last) “decentralized” draft party. As strange and — by television standards — awkward as hockey TV can get.
The best moment of the thing was the emotional lead-in to No. 1 overall pick Matthew Schaefer’s slam-dunk selection by the New York Islanders. The 17-year-old future star defender had lost his mother to cancer in early 2024.
But the most entertaining moment had to be Adam Sandler introducing the Boston Bruins’ first-round pick James Hagens on Friday night. He’s the pride of Boston College. He was ranked third among North American skaters in Central Scouting’s final rankings. He fell, too conveniently I might add, to the seventh pick where the Bruins acted like they were stunned and lucky to get him.
Anyway, with Gary Bettman acting like roving ringmaster with microphone in one hand and every talented kid’s hand in the other — at least he minimizes the NBA-style commissioner hugs — Bettman was trying very had to convince his audience that this new way of staging what actually is a non-TV event was absolutely worth the wait.
Never mind the several technical glitches he and eye-rolling ESPN talent were trying hard to skirt around.
Anyway, for the scant media who was hastily assembled wherever their individual teams told them to go, for the Flyers it was in a casino in Atlantic City. How appropriate. The one place in the entire region where people go bust on a regular basis.
Ah, but for at least one night and one very long Saturday of selections, all will remain positive. That’s because with Danny Briere, Keith Jones and now Rick Tocchet running the show, Big Brutes On Broad Street will soon be back in fashion.
So after drafting a 6-3, 205-pound power forward who plays like Matthew Tkachuk — or Keith Tkachuk, for that matter — at No. 6 overall Friday night in Porter Martone, then trading his other two first-round selection spots to rival Pittsburgh in order to move up to the No. 12 overall spot and pick a 6-4 185-pound raw center in Jack Nesbitt, Danny Briere was asked if it could be construed that he felt the Flyers needed to get bigger up front.
“Not really,” Briere said that night.
Certainly not.
“The priority with pick No. 1 was to get the best player available,” he added. “He’s the only winger in the first 12 picks. I think today, we said it all along, yeah, we would have preferred a center, but we felt we couldn’t pass up on the chance to bring a difference maker like Porter Martone to the team with the (sixth) selection.”
As for the Nesbitt pick, Briere had admitted earlier the club was “thin down the middle,” but there was some speculation that the Flyers were surprised at the number of centers going so quickly in that first round. So they moved up fast to get late-coming prospect Nesbitt.
“Because we didn’t get to jump in on a center on that (sixth) spot, we wanted to jump in and make sure we got a center and a center that can be a difference maker,” Briere said. “And you saw the rate that the centers were going.”
OK, but the important thing is Briere acknowledges that a top pick with skill doesn’t always translate to an effective player in a league that may not include anything close to real fighting and hard checking any longer, but is still innately weighted more favorably to physical forwards.
You wonder, considering their five consecutive years of missing the playoffs, would a first-round pick like Giroux (listed then at 5-11, but he probably was wearing lifts) in 2006, or Mike Richards (ditto on the alleged 5-11 size) three years before would be acceptable?
Coming off a year in which they drafted alleged 5-11 forward Jett Luchanko first — it’s like the NHL doesn’t allow height specs any smaller than that, kind of like the line on a piece of wood to those kids who want desperately to get into the bumper cars ride — they had no choice but to go big, bigger and biggest.
“I fully embrace the type of player I am, the big power forward who brings some nastiness and brings some grit to the lineup every night,” said St. Louis-born Shane Vansaghi, one of four second-rounders taken Saturday by the Flyers, and born the year Bobby Clarke took that kid — What’shisname? — Giroux.
“It’s a long road ahead,” Vansaghi added. “It’s a long process to get to the NHL, but I think getting drafted by the Flyers is going to be a good fit for me.”
Sure. Mainly because they need all the size they can get as soon as they can get it.
Briere balks at that type of thinking, repeatedly reminding that there are players such as 6-4 second-round pick (2024) Jack Berglund, physical defenseman Spencer Gill — also second round in 2024 — and 6-1 2024 fourth-round forward Heikki Ruohonen in the pipeline.
No guarantees there, of course.
So it was especially important for a team that over the past 10 years has the likes of diminutive Travis Konecny (2015 first round), Matvei Michkov (2023 first round), Cam York (first in 2019) and Bobby Brink (second in 2019) among their top drafted skill people. And they also went small with a couple of top picks that never got here (or chose not to) in German Rubtsov and Cutter Gauthier.
Thus, they absolutely, 100 percent had to and have to get bigger everywhere, but especially up front. And yet … “It wasn’t a plan that we had in mind going into the draft that we wanted to get bigger,” Briere said. “It just happened that way.”
We look ahead then to Tuesday, July 1. The commencement of the free agency period. Expect the Flyers to at least be a serious player that day.
And expect them to buy somebody tall.
Contact Rob Parent at rparent@delcotimes.com
Source: Berkshire mont