Danny Brière’s willingness to trade Carter Hart shows the new Flyers are thinking the right way

If there were any questions about the desire of the Flyers’ new leadership team to drag the organization, finally and fully, into the modern era of the National Hockey League, Danny Brière hopped on the radio Saturday morning and buried those doubts. There shouldn’t be a Flyers fan anywhere who listened to Brière’s interview on 94.1 WIP, who heard his comments about the possibility of trading goaltender Carter Hart, and who didn’t respond with a Hark, Hot Damn, and Hallelujah.

“I would say most likely Carter is going to be our goalie of the future,” said Brière, who officially became the team’s general manager earlier this month. “Now, I’m not in a position to turn down anything. If there are teams calling about him, we have to listen. That’s my job as a general manager. I have to listen. I have to do what’s best for the team and the organization.”

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For now, it doesn’t matter whether Hart remains the Flyers’ franchise goalie for the next decade or Brière sends him to Edmonton, Toronto, or somewhere else for a package of players, prospects, and draft picks. What matters is that Brière acknowledged that Hart, who doesn’t turn 25 until August, and who is the Flyers’ best and most important player at the moment, could be as valuable to the franchise as a trade asset as he is as a goaltender. What matters is the manner in which Brière — and presumably president of hockey operations Keith Jones and coach John Tortorella — is thinking about the measures that the Flyers have to take, and have been reluctant to take for too long, to return to relevance. To get to the point where they can talk about winning a Stanley Cup without people snickering.

They haven’t made the playoffs since 2020. They finished seventh in the Metropolitan Division last season after finishing eighth the year before that and sixth in the COVID-induced East Division the year before that. They don’t have enough high-end talent in their organization to compete for a championship, and it will take years to acquire enough. Goaltenders in the NHL are like quarterbacks in the NFL: Teams should always be acquiring them, developing them, and viewing them as the most precious of assets. The Flyers actually have some depth there on their roster and within their system, and Brière cited it Saturday: Hart, Samuel Ersson, Felix Sandström, Alexei Kolosov, Ivan Fedotov. (Although it remains to be seen whether Fedotov will ever be allowed to leave his Russian team.)

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If a potential trade for Hart has a chance to increase the organization’s stable of elite forwards and defensemen, not only should Brière be answering the phone from a GM calling with such a proposal, but he should be dialing and soliciting those offers himself to see what’s possible. They can’t afford to assume any player they have now will be locked in for the long term, not even a goalie as good as Hart.

Any potential Hart trade would likely have to wait until the findings of various ongoing investigations into sexual assault allegations made by a woman against five unnamed members of the 2018 Canadian World Juniors team — which Hart played on — are made public. One would think that teams considering trading for Hart, who said in September he is “fully cooperating” with the NHL investigation, or any other member of that World Juniors team, would be hesitant to give up assets before knowing the full details and potential ramifications from the case.

But Brière has made it clear that Hart is not untouchable if a suitable trade presented itself.

“The position that we’re in right now, we have to listen,” Brière said. “There are a lot of good, young players on our team. But at the same time, if it’s better for the organization to move in a different direction, we have to listen. There’s no one who’s above the team, and I’m going to listen on everyone. Now, I expect most of our young guys, including Carter Hart, to be back. But I have to be fair to the organization and the fans to listen if there’s a better offer elsewhere.”

Amen. And amen. And amen. From Bob Clarke to Paul Holmgren, from Ron Hextall to Chuck Fletcher, the Flyers have failed to understand that the NHL salary cap demands that a general manager maintain a level of roster flexibility and be willing to make unpopular decisions that none of those executives was willing to make.

It’s easy to sign Claude Giroux or Jakub Voracek — each a high scorer and popular player — to an eight-year contract in excess of $66 million. It’s easy to say that Wayne Simmonds is the consummate Flyer and, as such, shouldn’t be traded. It’s easy to bank that Travis Sanheim and Ivan Provorov will inevitably improve just because they’re young and talented. It takes a smarter, more daring mind to recognize that neither Giroux nor Voracek was capable of carrying a team like the league’s highest-caliber stars can. That Simmonds’ production was bound to decline as he aged, and trading him when he was in his prime and on a reasonable contract would have been astute. That it would be crippling to commit to Sanheim and Provorov for so many years and so much cap space if they never developed into bona fide No. 1 defensemen.

In Ed Snider’s era, in a pre-cap NHL when an owner’s deep pockets and desire to win could correct even the gravest of mistakes, the Flyers could foul up and, to a certain degree, overcome their errors. They were happy to sacrifice draft picks and promising players to do it. Hell, Fletcher was happy to strive for a new level of incompetent team-building, giving up two picks just to get Shayne Gostisbehere’s contract off the books, and then three more to add Tony DeAngelo a year later. Maybe Brière won’t prove to be any smarter when it comes to talent evaluation, but at least he seems to have a clearer view of the league’s landscape than his predecessors — and the freedom to be honest about how far the franchise has to go.

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“Things have changed,” he said. “It was different in the ‘80s and the ‘90s and even the 2000s, when you could go out and just buy the best players. Unfortunately, now with the salary cap, things have changed, and it’s become tougher to do. Most teams re-sign their free agents. They don’t let them walk away like they used to because the players knew they could get more money elsewhere. …

“You have to evolve with the times. Looking around the last few years at how teams have done it, it’s really tough to go out and just buy free agents and become a powerhouse in the NHL now.”

This was the reality that the Flyers either refused to face or didn’t know how to negotiate for years. For once, they have a general manager who sounds ready to do both. For once, maybe a franchise desperate to stop making bad decisions and start winning again stands a fighting chance.