upcoming draft<\/a>, which, you would think, might be available in the right deal for a young player or two who could help now and in the future. The Flyers could conceivably use some of those picks in trades, while also keeping enough of them to bolster what looks like a middle-of-the-road farm system.<\/p>\nThey don\u2019t have nearly as much to play with a year from now, with just a total of six picks \u2014 one in each round, except the fifth.<\/p>\n
So, shouldn\u2019t there be some urgency to finally take one of those proverbial big swings? Not in Briere\u2019s view, if you believe his comments. He suggested that the players the Flyers could select with their bevy of 2025 picks will eventually have more value than the picks themselves. And, in theory, could net a bigger return.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, the picks are just numbers, when you look at them. But, eventually there\u2019s a name to it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe one thing I\u2019ve realized is (that) when you talk to teams, is that those names become very powerful, (after) you start developing them. It\u2019s really tough to acquire the value that teams put on names (that) become stronger and stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flahr interjected: \u201cYou know what we\u2019re trying to do here. \u2026 We\u2019re not going to be throwing away (assets) for rental, older players. But if there\u2019s a younger player that fits in our age group that helps us now, or is worth a pick or certain picks, yeah, certainly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, there may not be any young, elite players out there to pursue. Briere strongly suggested as much when touching on the club\u2019s well-known need for another high-end center.<\/p>\n
\u201cCalling around the league and finding centers is almost impossible,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you\u2019re not going to find a first-line or second-line center. A lot of teams will be willing to entertain moving a fourth-line guy, but they will want a second-line winger in return. They\u2019re hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n
They are hard to find. But this is the path that Briere and president of hockey operations Keith Jones chose two years ago. They must have anticipated that this moment was coming.<\/p>\n
Briere expressed hope that some of the prospect centers already in the system (or that they could select next week) could eventually develop into high-end players, but that could be three or four years away \u2014 and the organizational plan, as he\u2019s made clear, is to be a competitive team sooner than that. Unless they find more talent before then, the Flyers are at risk of being stuck in that so-called mushy-middle for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it\u2019s all a smokescreen. Briere said he doesn\u2019t expect trade discussions to really ramp up until the start of next week. He may already have something up his sleeve that he\u2019s trying not to give away.<\/p>\n
But if the Flyers are going to achieve their plan of improving next season \u2014 and, therefore, making themselves a more desirable organization for free agents in the 2026 offseason, when they have tens of millions of dollars in cap space \u2014 the time to do something substantial may have arrived.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll find out soon enough if the general manager agrees. For now, at least publicly, he\u2019s tamping down that expectation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not going to pay crazy assets just to do something crazy,\u201d Briere said. \u201cIt has to make sense. If it doesn\u2019t, it doesn\u2019t, we\u2019ll select our players (in the draft). It might be all the picks, and there might be nothing that changes, but at the same time, if we have a chance to improve the team and it makes sense for the long term, we are going to look into it. So, it\u2019s on the table, but aggressive is probably the wrong word.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Top photo of Daniel Briere: Bruce Bennett \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VOORHEES, N. J. \u2014 Philadelphia Flyers general manager Daniel Briere has repeated a variation of the same phrase…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2276],"tags":[5,2291,4,1586,22384],"class_list":{"0":"post-115745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb-draft","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-major-league-baseball-draft","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-mlb-draft","12":"tag-philadelphia-flyers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114710730546642924","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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