With the 12th pick in the 2025 NHL Draft and with their second pick of the evening, the Philadelphia Flyers have selected center Jack Nesbitt from the Windsor Spitfires.
We were all wondering if the Flyers, equipped with six picks in the top 50 of this draft, would do some wheeling and dealing, but few would have expected it to be a trade with the Pittsburgh Penguins of all teams. But that’s what happened, as the Penguins dealt the 12th pick — the second of two in a row that they were slated to have in the first round — to the Flyers in exchange for the Flyers’ other two first-rounders at 22nd and 31st overall.
As for the pick itself, after grabbing Porter Martone with the sixth pick in the draft, it seemed like a near-certainty that they would look for either a center or a defenseman with their other pick(s) in the round, and they indeed look down the middle and grab a center with Nesbitt.
Nesbitt was 33rd on our Community Draft Board leading up to the draft, as we had the following to say about him:
Offensively, a lot of Nesbitt’s goals and chance-creation comes from being physical in and around the net. At 6’4”, 183 pounds, Nesbitt is able to use his body effectively against weaker competition to create offense. That’s also a fairly small 6’4” frame, so there’s lots of room for Nesbitt to add 15-20 pounds under an NHL development regimen. Nesbitt has already been able to turn his game into a power forward type at times, so if he continues to add muscle and figures out his skating? Maybe there’s more offense there than most projections anticipate for the player right now.
We also did a shift-by-shift watchalong of one of Nesbitt’s games earlier this month:
Nesbitt certainly fits the bill for people who were looking for the Flyers to add some size down the middle, and he looks like a guy who knows how to effectively leverage that size. The questions about him now will be what his upside is offensively. Nesbitt hovered just around a point per game this past season with Windsor, and certainly with the 12th pick in the draft the hope is that you’re getting a no-doubt-about-it top-six player who can contribute at both ends of the ice. Scouting reports and general consensus on him seemed to be mixed as to whether that’s a fair expectation.
Nesbitt does have good hands for a player of his stature, and you can see skill here and there. He has things you can’t teach (size) and should be able to add strength on as he gets older. Additionally, the Flyers have shown a willingness in the recent past to take guys who have skating weaknesses (whcih Nesbitt definitely does) in hopes that they can improve there. You can dream big on a player like this.
But it seems like there’s a lot of projection required to get there. It will be interesting to see if and how much growth we see from Nesbitt offensively as well as in his skating, as that will probably determine the ceiling of this pick.
In any case, Nesbitt joins Jett Luchanko among the big names in the Flyers’ prospect ranks at center. Trading both of their later-first-round picks for him shows that the Flyers are clearly confident in what they saw in the Windsor product.
More to come.