Cole Eiserman can flat-out score. Might the Flyers be interested in the first round of the draft?

First in a seven-part series highlighting players the Flyers might select in the first round of the NHL draft on June 28 in Las Vegas.

BUFFALO — The Flyers need a goal scorer, a game-changer, someone coach John Tortorella can tap on the shoulder to send out and put the puck in the net.

Meet Cole Eiserman, the top pure goal scorer in this year’s draft.

This past year, he broke Cole Caufield’s record for the most goals in a career in the U.S. National Team Development Program with 127. That’s more than Phil Kessel, Patrick Kane, and Auston Matthews. He notched 58 goals this season — ranking third in program history in a single season — with his last tally in a loss to Canada in the final of the IIHF Under-18 Men’s World Championship.

It should not surprise anyone that the kid who grew up a big Alex Ovechkin fan likes to light the lamp.

“Yeah, I think [Ovechkin] just has so much passion for it. Loves to score goals, loves to be a good teammate and stuff like that,” Eiserman told The Inquirer at the NHL Scouting Combine. “And I enjoy guys like that.”

Eiserman’s ascension to a goal-scoring threat did not happen overnight. He was “shooting as much as I could, whenever I could” — including on a net in his backyard in Newburyport, Mass. The net may have been surrounded by plexiglass, but that didn’t stop him from getting in trouble with his parents and neighbors for breaking a few things along the way.

“He does the hardest thing in hockey the best,” said Nick Fohr, head coach of the U.S. under-18 team. “He’s the best goal scorer there is in the draft class, in my opinion. ... Going into a game, I always felt like it was starting with a 1-0 lead because I knew Cole was scoring at some point.”

Eiserman is known to unleash his favorite type of shot, a slap shot, from the right face-off circle on a power play — just like Ovechkin from his office in the left circle. But while the left-handed shot loves to score with his P92 curve and heel-to-toe tape job, and brings some physicality, Eiserman’s game also comes with big question marks.

“His play selection, how well-rounded he is, cheating for offense, body language,” The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler told The Inquirer. “There are people who believe he’s going to be a bit of a liability or a quote-unquote headache in terms of the lack of a roundedness to his game.”

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A 200-foot game is something the 6-foot, 197-pounder Fohr has been working with on for the past year and a half. The bench boss noted that when they started, Fohr “couldn’t get him to go to the defensive zone” and “he would go back in there and he’d circle out of there as quickly as he could.” The staff would teach him what to do, and “he still wouldn’t do it.”

But Fohr has seen the 17-year-old, whom he calls coachable and has shown the ability to learn, make major strides.

“As I told him, no coach at the NHL level is going to let you play like this. You can’t play like this,” Fohr said during a recent phone interview. “It helps you score right now, but I said, and I would have clips that I could show him, ‘Look, if you would come and stop in the D zone and be where you’re supposed to be, just watch this clip, if you stop right where you’re supposed to be, look where the puck goes, right to you. And not only go play offense, now you’ve got the puck more.’

“So it started getting buy-in with him and we started getting somewhere to the point where he was doing a really good job. He wasn’t perfect, but in games where he was really locked in and his details were there — which, these kids are young and immature still so that’s not 100% of the time right?— but for him, it really started to come. There were games where I could trust to put them on the ice when we were up a goal late [during a] six-on-five.”

The young star knows he can grow and expand his game by “just always practicing different stuff and listening to coaches” and incorporating it into his game. He will get a chance to work on his all-around game at Boston University in the fall under the tutelage of Jay Pandolfo, who is not a bad guy to learn from. Pandolfo, who played 899 games with the Boston Bruins, New Jersey Devils, and New York Islanders, was a finalist for the Selke Trophy, awarded to the league’s top defensive forward, in 2007.

Until then, Eiserman has been skating and working out with a group of players, including NHLer Jack Eichel, former Flyers forward Kevin Hayes, and Will Smith, who recently signed his entry-level contract with the San Jose Sharks. And in less than two weeks, he’ll wait patiently at Sphere to hear his name called.

“It’s going be pretty cool. Probably going to black out and not really think about it,” Eiserman said with a smile said about walking across the stage and meeting his new team.

Could it be the Flyers calling his name at the No. 12 spot? Possibly. The one directive Tortorella has passed on to assistant general manager Brent Flahr, who runs the amateur scouting department, is that he wants competitive guys. Because, as Flahr explained to The Inquirer, “It’s just a hard thing to coach every day, for guys to compete, work hard. It’s just something that needs to be kind of ingrained in them.”

If you ask Fohr, that’s Eiserman.

“Yeah, he’s really competitive. He hates to lose at anything, and he’s a really competitive person,” Fohr said. “He understands how important scoring is, you’ve got to score to be able to win, right? And that’s his way to help his team win is to be that guy and he wants to be that guy. So he is competitive.

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“Does he compete in all areas? Does he compete in all the areas that John Tortorella wants him to? Not yet, but he has competitiveness, a high compete. [He is] a very intense person and he’s got a chance to be really, really good. It might take him a little bit of time. He’s not there today. But he’s the best goal scorer in the draft, and he’s shown the ability and the concern to get better defensively. And ... when that all comes together, he’s going to be a heck of a hockey player.”

If it’s indeed the Flyers calling his name, Eiserman is confident he can fit in because “they’re a hard-nosed team and I can kind of bring that style as well — and, obviously, I hope to bring a lot of goals.” Assuredly, his parents, Bill and Diane, will be beaming with pride from the stands, but don’t be surprised if Bill has a wider grin if Eiserman is donning the Orange and Black because as the young star revealed: “My dad was a huge Flyers fan growing up.”