‘It’s bad luck. It’s horrifying. It’s bizarre’: Revisiting the three-team trade involving Ryan Ellis and Nolan Patrick

In an alternate universe, Friday night’s game between the Flyers and the Vegas Golden Knights features the two centerpieces of a 2021 three-team trade — Flyers defenseman Ryan Ellis and Golden Knights center Nolan Patrick.

But in reality, the matchup will be just another reminder of what could have been.

On July 17, 2021, Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher traded 2017 No. 2 overall pick Patrick and defenseman Phil Myers to the Nashville Predators for Ellis. The Predators then flipped Patrick to the Golden Knights for center Cody Glass.

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The deal sought to provide the Flyers with a top-pairing, right-handed defenseman in the veteran Ellis while giving fresh starts to young, unproven players in Patrick and Myers. The same could be said for Glass, the No. 6 overall pick in the 2017 draft who had split time between the NHL and the AHL with Vegas over two seasons.

Most trades take more than a year and a half to label winners and losers, and the story of this one hasn’t necessarily reached its final chapter. But since the trade, the 31-year-old Ellis has played only four games and the 24-year-old Patrick has played just 25, both because of injuries. Myers, 25, was waived by the Predators in March, traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the offseason, has been waived twice more since the start of the season, and currently is playing in the AHL.

But as disappointing as the trade itself has become for the Flyers and the Golden Knights, the greater concern remains the uncertain health statuses of Ellis and Patrick and the prospect that neither may play in the NHL again.

“‘Disappointed’ is definitely a word that has to be in there,” former Lightning general manager Brian Lawton said. “But, at the end of the day, it’s bad luck. It’s horrifying. It’s bizarre. This should have been a Halloween trade when I look back at it, because I can’t think of anything spookier than what’s happened.”

Patrick arrived in Philadelphia after a productive (yet injury-riddled) junior career with the Western Hockey League’s Brandon Wheat Kings with the expectation that he could evolve into a No. 1 center with the Flyers. He began the 2017-18 season with the Flyers as the third-line center with the prospect of moving up to the No. 2 role by the end of the year.

“He was highly touted,” former Flyers winger and NBC Sports Philadelphia analyst Keith Jones said. “There was a lot of conversation about who would go one, two, and it’s funny, the defensemen that went three and four [Dallas’ Miro Heiskanen and Colorado’s Cale Makar] really weren’t mentioned nearly as much as Patrick and [eventual No. 1 overall pick Nico] Hischier [of the New Jersey Devils]. So those two centermen both had really lofty expectations, and it obviously didn’t play out the way that the Flyers envisioned.”

In his first two seasons with the team, Patrick played 145 games, registering 26 goals and 35 assists. Early in his tenure during the 2017-18 season, Patrick suffered a concussion that forced him to miss nine games. He sustained another late in the 2018-19 season.

That offseason, Patrick was diagnosed with a hereditary migraine disorder that Fletcher said was unrelated to past concussions. Patrick did not play during the 2019-20 season, but he accepted a one-year qualifying offer in October 2020 and made his NHL return — and scored a goal — on Jan. 13, 2021 after a 652-day layoff. Patrick struggled during that COVID-19-abbreviated season, tallying four goals, five assists, and compiling a minus-30 rating in 52 games.

Upon his trade to Vegas, Patrick reunited with his former Wheat Kings coach Kelly McCrimmon, now the general manager of the Golden Knights. Patrick’s brief time with the Golden Knights also has been marred by injury. He sustained an upper-body injury in late October 2021 that sidelined him for two months. In mid-February 2021, Patrick suffered another concussion that kept him out for another month. The Golden Knights announced in September that Patrick will not play this season.

“I don’t know that we’ll ever know what Nolan Patrick could have been,” Jones said. “Injuries are the reason that we won’t know that. There’s so much bad luck involved in that that it’s really hard to even measure because we only had a glimpse of what he potentially could do for the team and potentially do in the NHL because he just didn’t play very much.”

The Predators have a strong reputation for drafting and developing defensemen, from 2020 Norris Trophy winner Roman Josi to four-time All-Stars Seth Jones and Shea Weber. Ellis, an undersized defenseman at 5-foot-10 whom the Predators selected with the No. 11 pick in the 2009 draft, also fit into that echelon of talented, homegrown defensemen.

Before the NHL, the defenseman developed a reputation of being gifted offensively thanks to iconic performances for Canada at the World Juniors. But he blossomed into an offensive playmaker and more for the Predators throughout a 10-year career, becoming what Lawton deemed a “gritty, really hardworking, give-all-he’s-got” defenseman whose play transcended his size.

At the time Predators general manager David Poile traded Ellis to the Flyers, the team could no longer afford the remaining $37 million on Ellis’ contract over the next six seasons. Jones viewed the trade as a “steal” for the Flyers, considering their need for a right-handed defenseman to pair with Ivan Provorov and their willingness to move on from Patrick. While the trade shocked Ellis at the time, his availability made sense from the outside.

“He was a very noticeable, [a] very important player for Nashville on a blue line that had a lot of different options back there,” Jones said. “So it made sense that he would be expendable, because they’ve had such a good blue line for so long. It would be seemingly difficult for them to keep all those pieces.”

But injuries quickly derailed Ellis’ career with the Flyers. He sustained an undisclosed injury in the Flyers’ final preseason game against the Washington Capitals on Oct. 8, 2021. He played on opening night on Oct. 15, 2021 and the following two games before he exited the lineup for nearly a month. He returned on Nov. 13, 2021 against the Dallas Stars and has not played a game since. Maybe most frustratingly, in that four-game sample size, Ellis scored a goal, tallied four assists, and looked every bit the No. 1 defenseman the Flyers coveted.

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At the end of the season, Ellis addressed the media and expressed optimism in his ability to rehabilitate a multilayered “pelvic” injury and play the following season. But that aspiration took a turn when Fletcher announced at the start of training camp that Ellis would not play this season and that this injury could threaten his career.

“It’s just bizarre,” Lawton said. “I thought after last year’s press conference, that we would see Ellis ready to go this year. And that just hasn’t happened.”

In the offseason, the Flyers appeared to have been preparing for a worst-case scenario regarding Ellis, trading for Tony DeAngelo at the draft. But a quarter of the way into the season, and amid the team losing 13 of its last 15 games, DeAngelo has fallen off the Flyers’ top pairing and has been replaced by Rasmus Ristolainen for the time being.

“Right-handed-shooting defensemen are not something that’s readily available,” Jones said. “So you really have to search hard and really have to, in some cases, get lucky with the players that you pick up, and, unfortunately, Ryan Ellis and his inability to play has really caused an issue for the Flyers.”