The Flyers will be fascinating this season. They probably won’t be good for a while.

On one side of the Flyers’ locker room at their training center in Voorhees, just after practice had ended Monday afternoon, Matvei Michkov, 19, plopped himself at his locker. He began talking in halting English to a teammate next to him, reviewing the mistakes and missteps of a sloppy power-play drill. On the other side, Jett Luchanko, 18, stood in front of his stall, answering questions. The Flyers’ first-round pick in this year’s draft, he had surprised general manager Danny Brière and other decision-makers within the organization by performing well enough to persuade them to put him on the opening-night roster. More than anyone else in the room, the two commanded your attention.

“I don’t look at ages,” coach John Tortorella said. “I look at how they play. What I also watch is how they handle themselves, and they both have done a really good job of that.”

It probably goes too far to say that this is the most anticipated Flyers season in some time. No one should be surprised if they miss the playoffs this season. It would be nice for them and their fans if they reached the playoffs, for sure: a taste of the postseason for their least-experienced players, a tangible indication that the team was improving, at least a couple of home games to bring in that sweet and much-missed gate revenue — which the franchise hasn’t collected since 2018.

The Flyers denied themselves those benefits last season, thanks to that late eight-game losing streak when even the dregs of the NHL were too much for them, and even if they avoid a similar collapse, there shouldn’t be any illusions about the team they are in the here and now. The Flyers are young. Their goaltending is of questionable quality. Tortorella, who has already ruffled the feathers of a couple of important players — Sean Couturier, Cam York — may or may not be their head coach beyond this season.

» READ MORE: Flyers GM Danny Brière talks Jett Luchanko, Alexei Kolosov, and more: ‘He’s blown us away from Day 1’

So no, anticipation isn’t quite the right word. Curiosity works better, and Michkov and Luchanko are the best symbols of it. The Flyers are still going through a great sorting-out. They have to determine which players, on the current roster or in the farm system, will be among their foundational pieces if and when the club is ready to compete for a Stanley Cup. And the hard truth is that they’re still fairly early in the process, and they likely have a long way to go.

Scan the list of NHL champions over the last 10 years, and you’ll understand why. The hype and anticipation surrounding Michkov and his goal-scoring and playmaking abilities are understandable. “He’s obviously something, in the way he plays, that we don’t have a lot of,” Brière said, “and that’s why it’s so exciting.” He has been compared to Nikita Kucherov, the Tampa Bay Lightning’s star forward, and if Michkov can reach the heights that Kucherov has in his career — twice the league’s leading scorer, the NHL MVP in 2018-19 — the Flyers will be more than thrilled.

But the reason that Tampa won the Stanley Cup in 2020 and 2021 and reached the Final again in 2022 is that it had three other players of Kucherov’s caliber or close to it: center Steven Stamkos, defenseman Victor Hedman, and goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy. Most of the recent Cup winners had the same kind of powerful, in-its-prime core. The 2024 Florida Panthers had Matthew Tkachuk, Aleksander Barkov, and Sergei Bobrovsky. The 2022 Colorado Avalanche had Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen, and Gabriel Landeskog. The 2018 Washington Capitals had Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Bäckström, and John Carlson. The 2016 and 2017 Pittsburgh Penguins had Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, and Marc-André Fleury. The 2015 Chicago Blackhawks had Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith, and Brent Seabrook.

Have there been exceptions to this formula? Of course. The 2023 Vegas Golden Knights and 2019 St. Louis Blues had plenty of talent; no team can win a championship without talent. But it would be a stretch to suggest that either of them possessed the superstars, the best of the very best, that those other clubs did.

» READ MORE: A player by player look at the Flyers 2024-25 roster

“There are different ways you can build your team,” Brière said. “St. Louis that year was built with more depth and had a goalie [in Jordan Binnington] who got hot at the right time, too. Those superstars who we’re talking about, there are very few of them, so when teams have them, they don’t usually let them go. I wish we could have more, but I think it’s doable to build a contender without having any of them as long as you have good solid players who are at a star level below them.”

So how many of those über-elite players do the Flyers already have? They’d argue they have two: Michkov and Travis Konecny, whom they see as a diet Patrice Bergeron: scorer, penalty-killer, leader. And two, given the makeup of the rest of the roster, isn’t close to being enough yet. Maybe Owen Tippett, just 25 and the recipient of an eight-year, $49.6 million extension, or Tyson Foerster will grow into a 40-goal scorer. Maybe Luchanko and defenseman Jamie Drysdale, 22, will fulfill their potential … when? This season? Next season? Two years from now? Three? Maybe one of the several promising goalies in the system emerges as a clear No. 1. Maybe none of them does.

The point is that there’s only one way to find out, unsatisfying as it might be for the next few months. You keep an eye on the future. You follow the 2024-25 Flyers for what could be, not for what is. You watch, and you wait.