The Flyers have to hope their bad night is just the beginning of good things for Morgan Frost | Mike Sielski
Frost isn’t just another prospect. He was the centerpiece of a major trade in 2017, which raises the stakes for his success.
For all the ugliness of their 6-1 loss to the Sabres on Monday night, for all their attempts to prove that they can barely function as an NHL franchise without Sean Couturier, the Flyers have something else at stake now, aside from recovering from an embarrassing loss.
Couturier will be gone from the lineup for at least two weeks, maybe more, because of a rib injury he sustained last week, and in his place, at least for now, will be Morgan Frost. Monday’s was the first of seven games, at a minimum, that Frost could be filling in for Couturier, and this stretch has to be about more than the Flyers’ sustaining decent play without their best forward. It has to be about seeing what Frost can do with the opportunity before him now.
He is 21, having scored two goals in 20 games for the Flyers last season, and he is not just a highly regarded prospect for whom the team has high hopes. There should be some pressure on him here because of how he entered the organization: in June 2017 at the NHL draft, when then-general manager Ron Hextall traded a solid and established scoring center in Brayden Schenn to the St. Louis Blues for the chance to draft Frost.
The Flyers also received a conditional first-round pick in that deal, a pick that, in 2018, turned out to be Joel Farabee, who already appears on his way to justifying Hextall’s forward-thinking in making the trade. But Frost was, at the time, the Flyers’ primary target, and Hextall got him with the 27th overall pick.
“Every guy on our staff liked Morgan Frost,” Hextall said in a 2018 interview. ”We made that trade [because] OK, now it’s not a first-round pick. It’s Morgan Frost.”
Schenn was for the Flyers and continues to be for the Blues an asset, particularly on the power play, where he generates most of his offense. And Hextall was willing to sacrifice that production for the sake of the player he and his scouts believed Frost would become. He was a prolific scorer and playmaker for his four years with the Soo Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League, piling up 221 points in 125 games over his final two seasons there, then had 29 points last season in 41 games at Lehigh Valley before the pandemic hit. Then, by all accounts, he had a terrific training camp this winter.
“Morgan has earned this opportunity,” Flyers coach Alain Vigneault said before Monday’s game. “He is considered a very skilled player, a young player but very skilled. In our organization’s mind, if he develops the right way, with the right work ethic and the right attitude, he should be able to play in a top-six, top-nine role. If you’re going to get a good read for where he is right now in his playing capabilities, you have to put him with good players.”
Vigneault also didn’t want to disrupt the Flyers’ other three lines, particularly the one that, to damn with faint praise, was the team’s best Monday night: the fourth line of Scott Laughton, Michael Raffl, and Nic Aube-Kubel. “It brings energy,” Vigneault said. “It brings physicality. All three of those guys are penalty-killers. So I didn’t want to play with that.” So even though Frost hadn’t played in a meaningful hockey game in 10 months, there he was Monday, centering Oskar Lindblom and Travis Konecny, not quite as nervous as he was for his NHL debut last season.
“Coots is one of the best players in the league,” Frost said in an interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia before the opening faceoff. “Big shoes to fill. Just going to try to keep it simple and play hard.”
He made a couple of nifty passes and drew a penalty on his first shift, doing little thereafter, like the rest of his teammates. As bad as it was, for him and them, it was just one game, but the long-term calculus remains the same. Vigneault isn’t burying Frost on the bench, and he doesn’t want to have to do that. Konecny, Farabee, Aube-Kubel: These are the young forwards essential not merely to the Flyers’ present, but to their future, too. Morgan Frost gets a good, long chance to join them now, to show everyone that he was worth waiting for.