Photo Credit: Zack Hill
The NHL Draft will commence in less than a week, and for Danny Briere and the Flyers rumors continue to swirl around this organization. Extra draft capital always helps speed up a rebuild, and that’s what Briere appears to be honing in on. Just how do the Flyers separate players/prospects from other players/prospects? What makes them a good candidate to be selected by the orange and black? What type of players/prospects are the Flyers trying to steer away from? These are all valid questions, to which Brent Flahr answered it perfectly yesterday.
There aren’t many teams that would like to draft a player with character issues, and typically teams do their due diligence on the background of players before the draft commences. Sometimes character issues of a player are brought to light before the NHL Draft, and that is something that the Flyers want to steer away from, according to Brett Flahr, “Sometimes it’s off-ice scenarios, sometimes it’s injury related. We find out certain things at the combine or through MRI information from our doctors and they express concern or greenlight it, whatever,” said Flahr. “Our strength guys, they spend a lot of time watching all the workouts up there, gather all the data, and they run it, and they have some concerns about certain body types of certain players and whether they can get stronger and gain weight, who are great athletes, who aren’t. We’re not the NFL, so we’re drafting kids when they’re 17-18 years old, and you’ve seen them all.”
Flahr continues, “As long as our guys are comfortable that we can work with them, get them stronger, and hopefully become NHL players one day, then we’ll draft them. In some cases, it’s a lost cause. They’re just too small or too thin or not athletic, and when you’re talking about a player that may be a below average skater at this point – if it’s just simply strength related, then we can work with that – but if he’s fundamentally flawed and just not very athletic, then it’s a tough road to overcome.”
It’s great to hear the Flyers confident with growing these young players internally, to get them bigger and stronger, with the hopes of giving them a chance to excel at the NHL level. This is exactly why the President of Hockey Operations Keith Jones and the current Flyers’ General Manager Danny Briere have invested so much time this offseason in terms of refacing the Player Development aspect of the sport.
“It was a little longer – we decided to do our final meetings right after the combine just so Joak didn’t have to go back and forth from Europe four times,” Flahr said. They spent the whole week together in Buffalo, then the whole week last week here, and it got fairly heated there. I think I had to shut it down the last day just to get everybody away from each other and take a few days, take the weekend to come back. Pretty much every other day I’ve spoken to guys, and they want to tweak certain things. There’s certain things I didn’t like at the time, but you let slide and then I can adjust it as we want to.”
Flahr continued, “Just the way it works, and we’ll continue to discuss certain players right up until the draft, but our list is in pretty good shape right now. I think there’s probably, I’d say 90% complete and then I think there’ll be some tweaks through some final interviews, and also just some last-minute information sometimes, or just strong feelings. Especially some of the guys in the later rounds. We want guys that really want to fight for somebody. I don’t want to just take a name just because he’s on your list. Someone needs to have passionate about the player, for me, when you’re drafting a player late.”
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What the Flyers draft board looks like is anyone’s guess. All that everyone knows now is that their draft board is different from Craig Button’s draft board or my draft board. Everyone has their own draft board, but there are certain aspects that steer this organization away from certain prospects, and in some cases that is the best player available.
