If times were normal, we would all be finding ourselves tuning in three or four times a week right now to see the Philadelphia Flyers taking on the best teams the league has to offer. We would have been able to see where our team is compared to the rest of the league, and all would be good. Thanks to COVID, we can only assume/hope that the Flyers’ General Manager Chuck Fletcher has done enough to make sure that his team will not only be competitive this upcoming season but has also improved from their last. This for sure is going to be fairly difficult since one of the team’s 1st pairing defenseman (Matt Niskanen) made the decision to retire unexpectedly a year early after the team was sent packing by the New York Islanders in this year’s playoffs.
In any case, let’s take a look at how the lineup for next season may look when (or if) the season is ever set to begin.
1st Line
| Left Wing | Center | Right Wing |
| Claude Giroux | Sean Couturier | Jakub Voracek |
No big changes here folks. Head Coach Alain Vigneault (AV) will most likely try to squeeze one more year out of both Giroux and Voracek on the top line before deciding to offer anyone else the opportunity of playing with Couturier for an extended period of time. This doesn’t mean that throughout the course of the season that AV will not switch the lines around from time to time in order to put the best combinations out there on any given night against different opponents.
2nd Line
| Left Wing | Center | Right Wing |
| Oskar Lindblom | Kevin Hayes | Travis Konecny |
A healthy Lindblom should look to bring back quite the scoring punch to the Flyers’ second line, largely because before Oskar found out about his cancer scare, he was leading the team in goals through the first thirty games with eleven goals tallied.
3rd Line
| Left Wing | Center | Right Wing |
| James van Riemsdyk | Nolan Patrick/Morgan Frost | Joel Farabee |
This is where things could start to get interesting. Nolan Patrick has been scrimmaging quite frequently as of late and would be the obvious choice to center this line, but depending on when the team doctors deem him 100% and say he’s ready to return to regular game play is still yet unknown. This is where the delay in the start of the season could be viewed as a bright spot. The more time Patrick has to recover, the closer he will find himself to being ready to wear that orange and black sweater once again. If Nolan can’t go at the start of the season, the team’s star prospect Morgan Frost may find himself given the opportunity to center this line.
4th Line
| Left Wing | Center | Right Wing |
| Michael Raffl | Scott Laughton | Nicolas Aube-Kubel |
If Frost has taken all this free time to try and improve upon his game (like he has rumored to have been doing) he could fill in as the third line center until Patrick is ready. This would allow the team to move the versatile Scott Laughton back to center on the fourth line, giving the Flyers a quite impressive bottom three. These three would not only shut down their opponent’s top lines defensively, but be quite the scoring threat as well between Laughton having a career best 13 goals last season and Nicolas Aubé-Kubel (NAK) who will likely be asked to take on a larger role next season with Tyler Pitlick’s departure to Arizona. The reason why Frost would most likely be the choice to fill in as the third-line center over Laughton is because the team would like to allow Morgan adequate playing time so he can continue to develop his game. Scott, on the other hand, is more trusted by the organization at this point with defensive abilities and thus will see plenty of playing time on the team’s penalty killing units.
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Now for the Defensive unit which is set to have changed drastically from last season, with the pairings as follows:
1st Pairing
| Left Side | Right Side |
| Ivan Provorov | Philippe Myers |
One of the most underrated defensemen in the league, Ivan Provorov, is set to receive a new line-mate after (his former partner) Matt Niskanen called it quits at the end of last season. It will undoubtably be hard to match the type of instant chemistry that these two had from day one of being paired together, but the young and talented Myers may have just what it takes to step up and play alongside this talented defenseman. Myers ranked second on the team this past season in plus/minus with a plus 17 average. This is a huge feat considering that the only person that bested him on the team was the NHL’s 2020 Selke Award winner (an award given to the best defensive forward) Sean Couturier with a plus 21 average.
2nd Pairing
| Left Side | Right Side |
| Travis Sanheim | Erik Gustafsson |
It was a tough decision to break up Sanheim and Myers, but the recently inked, offensively talented Erik Gustafsson should fill in well enough. Now, Erik is not a right hand shot like the team was said to be looking for, but has plenty of NHL games under his belt and should manage just fine.
3rd Pairing
| Left Side | Right Side |
| Robert Hagg | Justin Braun |
No need to fix what worked last season. These two-defensive defensemen make up an impeccable shut-down pairing that will help their goaltender Carter Hart prevent goals from being scored by the best the opposition has to offer.
Goaltending
| Starter | Backup |
| Carter Hart | Brian Elliott |
As for goaltending. The team choose to listen to their young franchise netminder and stay the course with the paring of Carter Hart and Brian Elliott. Now, with all the goaltenders that were available this off-season, the team did have a chance to upgrade the position but with the uncertainty of the upcoming season it might have been the best move to just stay with what the team knows. In case the NHL does decide to press on with a shortened season, Hart will not have to worry for he will still have the guidance of the wisely old veteran (Elliott) that he has come to know and respect.
Who is left? Well, on the outside looking in you have defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere, who has been rumored to be on the trading block for some time now, and if you didn’t think he was in AV’s dog house before then you should have seen the light when the team had open slots on the roster and chose to re-sign Justin Braun and sign unrestricted free agent Erik Gustafsson (a player whose play mimics that of the now twenty-seven year old Gostisbehere) rather than just insert Shayne back into the lineup for next season.
The team also has the 6’7 defenseman Samuel Morin still on the roster; but with Sam facing season-ending injury after season-ending injury it doesn’t look like the team puts that much faith into the once promising bruising blueliner anymore.
Then there’s Mark Freidman, who looks like a lock to be the team’s 7th defenseman next season after signing a one-way contract during the break in play earlier this year. Mark’s size (or lack thereof) may scare some (this writer included) but somehow, he still manages to play that mistake-free style of hockey that got him drafted.
Like it or not, this is the best lineup Philadelphia currently has to put on the ice. Now, is it the one that has all the free agent acquisitions that we wanted the team to obtain this off-season? NO; but it is the one that is now on its way to becoming completely healthy once again! For that matter, who knows if Chuck Fletcher is even done making moves this offseason. With any luck he may still have a trick up his sleeve to further improve upon the Flyers’ lineup. Only time will tell if this year’s club will be the next great Philadelphia team to hoist a championship banner. Let’s just hope play will resume soon enough so we can tune in to find out.
You can find me on Twitter @lngbassist39
