What Latest Roster Cuts Say About Flyers’ Future

The latest round of training camp roster cuts leaves the Philadelphia Flyers with 37 remaining players, and they’ll need to get down to 23 before the start of the regular season.

Friday’s cutdowns saw Ronnie Attard, Louie Belpedio, Rhett Gardner, J.R. Avon, Elliot Desnoyers, Massimo Rizzo, Brendan Furry, and Jacob Gaucher all returned to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms to play in the AHL for the start of the 2024-25 season.

For a player like Attard, who had to pass through waivers (and cleared on Saturday), that’s a pretty telling move on the Flyers’ behalf. Attard, a former third-round pick who’s now 25 years old, struggled tremendously when the Flyers played the Montreal Canadiens last week.

If he’s not ready to make a real push for the NHL and unable to show that his game has matured enough to be an NHLer, Attard just might be who he’s going to be at this point: an AHL standout who can put up some points but cannot stand up to the pace and details of the NHL.

It seems that this is the conclusion the Flyers came to, and so they will give that opportunity to other young defensemen, like Emil Andrae, Adam Ginning, Helge Grans, Hunter McDonald, and Oliver Bonk.

In time, Spencer Gill will be entering that conversation, too.

For Attard, this was as much a numbers game as it was running out of time.

Similarly, Desnoyers had a completely realistic chance of making the NHL roster to start the 2024-25 season, but it became apparent very quickly that winger Olle Lycksell had leapfrogged him in the pecking order. That is, if Lycksell wasn’t already ahead to begin with.

Desnoyers was mostly good but never great this past training camp, and that won’t be enough to join the rest of John Tortorella’s troops in the NHL on a permanent basis.

The 22-year-old saw his scoring cut in half last season, amassing only 22 points in 63 games after putting up 44 in 61 games during his rookie season in the pros with the Phantoms in 2022-23. That alone was probably cause enough for the Flyers to have Desnoyers spend another year in the AHL, but they at least gave him the training camp to say otherwise.

It didn’t work out that way.

In conclusion, the Flyers parted ways with two of their older, once-promising prospects very early in the preseason. They want to breed a culture of competition and excellence, so the next step in the rebuild is weeding out the average players from the good and the great.

As Flyers general manager Danny Briere said in the latest edition of “The Standard”, last season was a nice step, but it’s not good enough anymore.

Therefore, other prospects will soon get greater opportunities if or when those ahead of them fall short of the mark as Attard and Desnoyers have. That means that Andrae, Grans, and Lycksell, in particular, are on deck.

The next few days and weeks will show if those prospects are ready or if they’ll be forced to walk the plank.