Embrace the tank, Flyers fans. Trading Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost likely was just the first domino.
The Flyers got worse in the short-term by moving Frost and Farabee. Trading Scott Laughton and Rasmus Ristolainen could be next.
Most Flyers fans over the past 18 months can be divided into two buckets.
The first group consists of fans who are sick of rebuilding and instead want the Flyers to make a splashy move to spark the end of the team’s four-year playoff drought. The other — and seemingly much larger — portion of the fan base has been harping the past few years for management to sell off players and bottom out to accumulate future assets and give the team its best chance of achieving the best draft pick possible.
Based on the Flyers’ recent decision to trade Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee to the Calgary Flames, it looks like that second group is poised to finally get its wish.
Last season, the Flyers played the middle at the trade deadline against the backdrop of an overachieving team in playoff contention. The Flyers traded pending unrestricted free agent defenseman Sean Walker but resisted moving any roster players with contract term, namely sought-after veterans Rasmus Ristolainen, Scott Laughton, and Nick Seeler. The result was the Flyers narrowly missing the playoffs and finishing with the league’s 12th-worst record. They held their spot in the draft lottery at No. 12 before trading down one pick on draft night to 13th and selecting center Jett Luchanko.
GM Danny Brière had said “everything’s on the table” last March, but the Flyers, outside of making the one no-brainer move with Walker, largely maintained the status quo, and even re-signed the 30-year-old Seeler to a four-year, $10.8 million extension.
“If teams are not willing to meet our price and what we feel is fair, you know, we’re a playoff team [right now],” Brière said days before last year’s deadline, “we get to keep them, and we get to make a run.”
In other words, the Flyers weren’t going to just trade people to trade people, and, frankly, they didn’t need to, given that Laughton and Ristolainen — who was injured at the time — still had plenty of term remaining. This led to a lot of backlash from fans, most of it focusing on Brière’s unwillingness to move well-liked glue guy Laughton, who doesn’t really fit the team’s timeline but who, aside from his versatility as a player, is held in high regard for his value in the locker room as a connector and leader.
After a quiet few months on the trade front to start this season, impatience and distrust — scar tissue built up from years of Flyers managerial malpractice and decades of misguided quick fixes — started to permeate across the fan base again, particularly following trades involving young defenseman David Jiříček and superstar winger Mikko Rantanen. The common refrain: Why isn’t Brière doing anything?
In the early hours of Jan. 31, Brière did something. He shipped top-nine forwards Farabee and Frost to the Flames for an underwhelming return of struggling winger Andrei Kuzmenko, depth player Jakob Pelletier, a second-round draft pick, and a future seventh. While maybe not a blockbuster trade in terms of the players involved, the move seems to mark a turning point in the team’s rebuild.
The first part of the team’s rebuild led by Brière, Keith Jones, and John Tortorella centered on “subtraction” and getting rid of players who didn’t fit or needed/wanted to be moved: Ivan Provorov, Kevin Hayes, Tony DeAngelo, and, ultimately, disgruntled prospect Cutter Gauthier. Trading Walker was dictated by the player’s expiring contract.
» READ MORE: The Flyers keep telling you they are rebuilding. Their latest trade is another sign to believe them.
This recent trade was different. Brière and Co. decided essentially to give up on two players in their mid-20s, who were high draft picks, and who the Flyers either controlled (Farabee) or could have controlled (Frost was set to be a restricted free agent) for future years. The Flyers decided that they’d rather have the $8-9 million in cap space than keep Farabee for three more years at $5 million and re-sign Frost, who was due a raise. Brière did this despite the salary cap jumping an unprecedented $7.5 million next year and the ramifications it would have in the room.
The move is an encouraging sign for a few reasons. First, the Flyers made the move to get worse in the short term while remaining in the playoff mix (they were five points out entering Jan. 30), which indicates this regime truly is prioritizing the future and playing the long game as promised. Second, based on Brière’s comments, the Flyers made this deal primarily for cap space and seem unlikely to keep the 29-year-old Kuzmenko, a pending unrestricted free agent, beyond these final 25 games.
The Flyers, who have lost three of four games since the trade and 12 of their last 19 overall, likely will continue to improve their draft spot as a result of the deal as well. At the 4 Nations Face-Off break, the Flyers are tied for the seventh-fewest points in the league, and realistically could slide to as low as third. The 2025 draft is widely considered to be weaker and less deep than last year, adding increased motivation to get a top-five pick and a chance to land a blue-chip center prospect like James Hagens, Michael Misa, Roger McQueen, or Anton Frondell.
As Brière said, the trade gives the team options going forward, particularly as it looks to address its gaping hole at center ice.
“It was a really tough trade to make, but we feel for the future, the cap flexibility that it brings us, [it] gives us the chance to do something,” Brière said Feb. 1. “I don’t know how soon. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in the next few weeks or months, but moving forward, for years to come, it just gives us more cap flexibility.”
Moving Frost and Farabee also seems like a setup trade, as the Flyers traded a center, already a position of weakness, and got none back. Do they now prepare a package of players and draft picks — they have three firsts and four seconds in this year’s draft — for an elite center like Vancouver’s Elias Pettersson, whose no-trade clause kicks in on July 1? Or do they continue selling and accumulating more young players and picks by trading the likes of Laughton and Ristolainen ahead of the March 7 deadline?
With talks having reportedly heated up on Laughton and Ristolainen leading into the 4 Nations Face-Off, it looks more and more like the Flyers will be committed sellers at this year’s deadline. Embrace the tank, Flyers fans. It’s here.
» READ MORE: Could Elias Pettersson be the answer to the Flyers' longstanding center crisis?