The Toronto Maple Leafs were fortunate to draft phenoms William Nylander and Mitch Marner as foundational parts of their blueprint for success. And in this cover story from THN's March 4, 2016 edition -- our 2016 Future Watch edition -- senior writer Ken Campbell put together a deep-dive profile of Marner and Nylander:

THE RIGHT WAY

The Toronto Marlies are generally treated as the bastard child of the Toronto Maple Leafs, an afterthought in a hockey market where fans call into talk radio and wonder why their NHL team can’t just trade for P.K. Subban, like it’s that easy, or simply snap their fingers and sign Steven Stamkos and John Tavares when they become free agents. Toronto’s AHL franchise plays in a former horse palace, albeit a wonderfully refurbished one that makes for a great viewing experience, and despite being in the AHL’s biggest city and the Center of the Hockey Universe™ where they’re in first place and the NHL team is dead last, you can always get a ticket. Sometimes you might even have to pay for it. But there’s a lot of foot room for patrons since the arena is usually only about two-thirds full.

On this day in early February, however, the Marlies have the rule of the roost. The Maple Leafs are out of town on an extended road trip, so the Marlies take over the big club’s practice facility, a four-pad rink in the west end of the city. At one point during practice, Marlies coach Sheldon Keefe breaks the team into two groups, with one traipsing over to one rink to work exclusively on skill development and the other staying behind to work on systems.

It is brilliant. And it’s just one of a myriad of reasons why, for the first time in years, there is a light at the end of the dark tunnel that does not resemble an oncoming train. From the top down, the Maple Leafs have gone from being an organization that relied on free agency and trades to one whose primary focus is drafting the right players and developing them properly. The Leafs are aiming to become one of those franchises that uses its financial might to stock its front office with the best talent identifiers in the game and then trust them to draft the best players, develop them into stars and use that to attract top free agents. “We want to become the New York Yankees of the NHL,” said first-year GM Lou Lamoriello. “There’s no reason why we can’t.”

One of those players is William Nylander, a quiet 19-year-old with great blond flow and on-ice moves that are just as impressive. He’s a little undersized by NHL standards, but he has wonderful puck skills, can score and set up plays with equal aplomb, and gets around the ice pretty well. And like his father, former NHLer Michael Nylander, William comes with great expectations. In our 1992 Future Watch edition, we ran a story on a 19-year-old Michael that might have just slightly raised expectations. The headline read, “The G-Word,” and made references to how Michael, then a Hartford prospect playing in Sweden, was being compared to Wayne Gretzky.

The son doesn’t face the same burden of expectation, but it is there. You’d better believe it is. The Maple Leafs are in complete rebuild mode, and the pain that coach Mike Babcock forecasted when he signed the richest coaching contract in the history of the game last summer is coming to fruition. Quite nicely, actually. The Maple Leafs could have the firstoverall pick this year if the Edmonton Oilers don’t steal it from them.

And thanks to a tear-down orchestrated by team president Brendan Shanahan, they could be picking in the top five for the next couple drafts, quite an about-face for an organization that has made a cottage industry of frittering away draft choices. A few days before the trade deadline, the Leafs had two first-round picks, including a conditional pick from the Penguins that could be used this year, giving the team potentially 12 picks at the 2016 draft. Stamkos and Auston Matthews await, and fans are expecting the first real rebuild in decades to lead to a Stanley Cup parade through Canada’s financial district and down Bay Street.

And Nylander is a large part of that. He has moved up nine spots in our individual Future Watch rankings to second overall among NHL-affiliated prospects playing outside the league. And Mitch Marner, who is tearing up the OHL with the London Knights, is right behind him at No. 3. It’s rarified air for the Maple Leafs and almost uncharted territory for anyone. Since THN began compiling its top-50 prospect list in 1994, a two-three punch has occurred only once – in 2000 when Henrik and Daniel Sedin were the No. 2 and 3 prospects. (Do those guys do anything apart?) Two years before, the New York Islanders had the No. 2 and 4 prospects in Eric Brewer and Roberto Luongo, and in 2006 the Pittsburgh Penguins had the No. 1 and 6 prospects in Evgeni Malkin and Marc-Andre Fleury.

The Leafs, meanwhile, are showing tangible signs of putting out the tire fire that has been their program of drafting and developing. The salary cap era hasn’t been kind to them, to say the least. Since 2006, the Leafs have never placed higher than 18th in our Future Watch rankings and have had an average ranking of 26th since 2006. The past three years, they’ve been ranked 25th, 29th and 27th.

That’s all changing with the additions of Nylander and Marner and will only improve as the prospects keep coming. Going into March, Nylander had spent the entire season in the AHL despite repeated howls to call him up to the Maple Leafs. As of mid-February, the Maple Leafs had called up a total of 14 players from the Marlies, not once bringing up Nylander. As they struggled through bad play and a rash of injuries, Nylander was still waiting to play his first NHL game. And the lack of a recall was not based on his play. With 40 points in 32 games, Nylander was behind only two other players among the AHL’s top 100 scorers in points per game.

The sense is the Maple Leafs, an organization where blue-chippers have gone to watch their careers go down a sinkhole, are doing right by Nylander. No sense in making him a part of this mess. But with that grooming comes expectation. Perhaps not the Gretzky-esque projections his father faced, but there is certainly that savior element to all of it. It’s a delicate balance of managing expectations and dealing with the reality that he’s playing in the AHL when he’s better than most of the players he sees on the big team.

“From the time I was young, people have looked at my father and what he did and just expected me and my brother (Alex, the leading scorer for the Mississauga Steelheads of the OHL and a first-round prospect for the 2016 draft) to be good players,” Nylander said. “It hasn’t really changed. It’s just there are more expectations and they’re bigger. But you don’t think about that. You just go out and play.”

His ability to do just that has undoubtedly been aided by the family support he has had around him. Michael landed a gig as an assistant coach for the Steelheads this season, so he and his two sons live in a small house together in Toronto, where Dad does all the cooking. Mom, Camilla, and the three younger sisters – aged nine, 11 and 15 – were due to move into a new house sometime in March so the family could be together. For all the great things that have happened to him this season, there have been some setbacks, and it was comforting for Nylander to have his family with him.

In Sweden’s first game of the World Junior Championship, Nylander absorbed a blindside hit and was knocked out of the tournament with a concussion, a crushing blow considering he was cherishing the opportunity to perform on the world stage with his younger brother and best friend.

“How often does a guy get to play in the world juniors with his brother on the same line?” Nylander said. “Before the hit came, we had played two shifts together and scored one goal. And you’re thinking, ‘This can’t be happening.’ I think if I had played, we would have had a good chance of winning the gold medal.” Then when he was recuperating from his concussion, he came down with appendicitis and was on medication for about a week. “We caught it early so they were able to give me some medicine,” Nylander said. “If I get it again, they’ll have to take it out. It was a short fix, and hopefully it stays that way.”

Ask any NHL scout and he’ll tell you that the biggest adjustment a player has to make in his career is getting to the AHL level, not the NHL. When a player, particularly a teenager, shows up in the AHL for the first time, he comes to the realization he’s playing for keeps now. He’s playing with men, some of them veterans in their 30s with NHL experience, whose success in the AHL is directly linked to their ability to put food on their family’s table. But it has been an almost seamless transition for Nylander, who came to the AHL from Sweden in the middle of last season. Projected over a full season, Nylander’s numbers from parts of two seasons equate to an 80-point campaign, all of which has been accomplished as a teenager who doesn’t turn 20 until May.

There is a good reason for that. Nylander, as well as the rest of the family, followed Michael on almost all his NHL stops. After his dad was traded from the Hartford Whalers to the Flames, Nylander was born in Calgary and followed his father to Tampa, Chicago, Washington, Boston, New York, then back to Washington. William has been a hockey nomad, jumping between Sweden and North America as a kid, playing at the age of 14 for the Chicago Mission bantam team that lost the national championship to Belle Tire from Detroit, a team that would later have nine NHL draft picks, including first-rounders Dylan Larkin, Zach Werenski, Brendan Perlini and Kyle Connor.

Nylander had hoped to dominate the 2016 WJC with Sweden like he’d been doing in the AHL with the Marlies, but a blindside hit knocked him out of the tournament early. A case of appendicitis then delayed his return to the Maple Leafs’ farm club.

But the other reason is that this season is the fifth one that Nylander has been playing with men, going back to playing in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s secondtier pro league, with his father. From there he moved to the Modo hockey factory of the tier-1 Swedish League in northern Sweden before joining the Marlies. “I’ve been playing with men since I was 16, so coming here and playing with men wasn’t really that big of a difference,” Nylander said. “The way the game is played over here was the only real difference. ‘Kapi’ (fellow Maple Leafs’ prospect and world juniors hero Kasperi Kapanen), we both were playing with men when we were really young.”

But there is no hiding in a city where even prospects can be under a microscope at times. Despite playing in the minors, Nylander often gets identified in public. He is happy to pose for pictures and sign autographs, and he doesn’t get rattled when fans tell him to go out and win a Stanley Cup for them before they die. Before that happens, he has to become a player who is ready for the rigors of the NHL and the demands of playing in the best league in the world. “He wants to be great,” Keefe said. “Willie is a strong guy. His leg strength and power is right up there with anybody on our team. It’s intensity and competitiveness on both sides of the puck and consistency in his game. It’s up to us to make sure that he’s ready when that call comes.”

The Maple Leafs have made a statement on how they want to handle their young players in the way they’ve dealt with Nylander. And they’re making a statement about their future by staying with a plan that will exchange all of this pain into pleasure for their success-starved fans down the road. For the first time, there are no shortcuts, no blustery GM proclaiming a disdain for five-year plans and talking about how they name schools after you if you win a Stanley Cup in Toronto.

Now at the helm is Lamoriello, who won three Stanley Cups with the Devils and made a career out of being able to accurately and continually gauge the worth of players. Instead of having a front office filled with highly paid executives, the Leafs have put their resources into young minds, top scouts and people with backgrounds in assessing players both with eyeballs and flow charts.

“You never duplicate a situation,” Lamoriello said of the experience he brings over from the Devils. “Coming here, we’re going to have a Leaf way of doing things. Maybe it’s a combination of Detroit, maybe it’s a combination of New Jersey and a combination of Toronto making us who we are. What excites me most about this (scouting) staff is you cannot be afraid of making a mistake, and you cannot be afraid of taking a risk. They don’t all work out, but safe decisions are not always the best.”

Case in point, Mitch Marner. His potential is enormous, and he’s a player director of player personnel Mark Hunter recruited and developed for the London Knights. When the Carolina Hurricanes came to Toronto in late January, Leaf fans got to see Noah Hanifin, taken one pick after Marner in 2015, play 21 shifts at the NHL level totalling 21:35 in ice time and look very good. And Hanifin may turn out to be a better player than Marner, but the upside with Marner is very high. He’s a sublimely gifted offensive talent who makes jaw-dropping plays and is well on his way to his second consecutive 100-point season in the OHL. Hanifin will be a very good NHLer, but Marner has an opportunity to be a great one.

Maple Leafs brass wasn’t afraid to take a risk on the high-end potential of Marner.

And so it goes with the Maple Leafs, an organization that has seen more transition over the past couple years than any other. Change is difficult, something the Maple Leafs can attest to as they look up at 29 other teams in the standings, but change can also bring better days. With Shanahan at the helm and seemingly able to convince anyone to do what he wants – whether it’s by convincing the team’s board of governors to dispense with playoff revenues and commit to a rebuild or convince the likes of Babcock and Lamoriello to join him in his quest – there has never been a steadier hand at the tiller.

Hunter is regarded as one of the hardest working and best assessors of young talent in the game, Keefe is one of the games brightest up-and-coming coaches, and the Maple Leafs have a stable of young players they can finally point to and have a sense of hope.

“It’s an exciting time, but we haven’t done anything yet,” Lamoriello said. “Yes, there’s a vision, which is real. There’s a process, which is real. There’s a plan, but we have to stick with it and not think there’s an easy way. I’m very comfortable with it, and all our people are comfortable in their own skin. This is a good environment, but we’re not there yet.”

Colorado Avalanche star center Nathan MacKinnon has just about done it all -- winning a Stanley Cup, winning individual awards, and winning a 4 Nations Face-Off tournament. The only reason he hasn't won an Olympic gold medal is because NHLers haven't been allowed to play at the Olympics during his incredible professional career. And in this feature story from THN's March 5, 2018 edition, editor-in-chief Ryan Kennedy profiled MacKinnon as he rose through the ranks of the best players on the planet and became the Avs' best player:

MAC’S BACK

By Ryan Kennedy

NATHAN MACKINNON HAS NEVER cared much for being an underdog. He never had to. Until his sophomore year in the NHL, winning came as easily and often as the comparisons to his Cole Harbour hometown buddy Sidney Crosby.

Even off the ice, MacKinnon expected to win. At Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota, where he helmed the same powerhouse prep school team that Crosby once did, MacKinnon used to play basketball with teammate Taylor Cammarata and a small group of others. MacKinnon, a huge hoops fan, would always pretend to be Kobe Bryant, while Cammarata, to this day listed at just 5-foot-7 and 161 pounds, would be the diminutive legend Allen Iverson. “It would start off with us just fooling around,” Cammarata said. “But it would get competitive. There were some hard fouls.”

One of the reasons MacKinnon chose Bryant was because the L.A. Lakers icon was never the underdog. ‘Black Mamba’ was expected to win, and he almost always did, helping the Lakers capture five NBA titles and getting to the final on two other occasions. “Kobe was one of the best ever to play sports,” MacKinnon said. “He showed what a killer mentality could do. He was like Michael Jordan, one of the best closers.”

The winning followed MacKinnon to Halifax where he led the Mooseheads to the QMJHL championship and the Memorial Cup in 2013. The good times kept rolling when Colorado drafted him No. 1 overall that summer and MacKinnon jumped straight to the NHL. He put up a Calder Trophy rookie season and the Avalanche surprised everyone with 52 wins and 112 points for an out-of-nowhere Central Division title. But the analytics community hated how Colorado played under new coach Patrick Roy and predicted doom in the post-season. Sure enough, the possession-deficient Avalanche came crashing back to reality in the first round, losing to the seventh- seeded Minnesota Wild.

Then, the franchise began wandering in the desert. The Avs finished 21st overall twice in a row after MacKinnon’s freshman year, then bottomed out last season, posting the worst record in the NHL’s shootout era with just 48 points. “My first year in the league, we clinched with, like, 10 games left in the season and won the division,” he said. “You start to think the game is easy, you’re just used to it. After that, the past three years we missed the playoffs and last year was a disaster. It’s good, though. Obviously, I’d like to have four Cups in my first four years right now, but I don’t. It makes you appreciate it. Last year, we would have given anything just to be in the mix, so we’re not going to take this lightly. We haven’t gotten complacent.”

But this season, MacKinnon is starting to win again, and the superstar potential that brought continual comparisons to Crosby is starting to come to fruition (they’re even both repped by agents Pat Brisson and Judd Moldaver). All it took was for his mind to finally catch up with his body – and that’s saying something since, short of Connor McDavid, few players in the NHL are as fast as MacKinnon, who has brought respect back to the once laughingstock Avalanche and put himself into Hart Trophy contention in the process.

In his first four years in the NHL, MacKinnon relied on the talent and emotional tenacity that had made winning come so natural to him as an amateur. Yet for all his blazing speed and spectacular skill, he remained a step or two behind the league’s elite. To become one of the big boys, MacKinnon realized he didn’t need to actually get faster. Instead, he had to rethink his explosive skating and learn the art of deception at the NHL level. Basically, he was a fastball pitcher who needed to add a change-up to his arsenal. “You can’t have one gear,” MacKinnon said. “You’re too predictable like that. A lot of times, I just tried to go full speed. I’m trying to change speeds more and slow down in the neutral zone. My linemates obviously can skate, but when I slow down the pace it helps them and it helps me.”

Changing speeds isn’t the only mental magic MacKinnon has conjured this season. He has also overcome the emotional roadblock he’d put up between his sublime skill set and his approach to the game. MacKinnon admits his maturation process took longer than it does for other players thrust into the spotlight and that it was the mental side of the game that had been holding him back. “It’s been a tough process,” he said. “I had a good first season, but it’s been tough the past three years. You do a lot of growing. Mentally, it takes time to get a hold of things and be consistent.”

Keeping an even keel and solving Wayne Gretzky’s equation for NHL success (90 percent mental, 10 percent physical) hasn’t been easy for MacKinnon since coming into the league. He was used to winning and was expected to be an instant superstar, so when losing became the norm in Colorado and stardom wasn’t immediate, he struggled.

Erik Johnson has been with the Avalanche for eight seasons now. He too was taken first overall (by St. Louis in 2006) and has watched MacKinnon since he entered the league. “He came in at 18 years old…you’re still a kid then,” Johnson said. “He’s a really emotional guy, and when things weren’t going well for him it could hold him down. Now he has really calmed down and is taking things in stride more. He’s always been a heart-on-his-sleeve guy, and he has found a way to reset after every game, to not let things go to his head, either good or bad.”

Perhaps most impressive is that MacKinnon doesn’t have a fancy sports psychologist to credit for his growth. He just gutted his way through the grind and finally figured out how to approach the game the right way. Undoubtedly, it helps he has spent every summer training with Crosby, who also played with high emotion when he entered the NHL. (MacKinnon has even upped his golf game, to the point where he now gets the better of Crosby on the links in the off-season.)

“Last year was tough (for him),” Crosby said. “He wasn’t happy with the way it went, both individually and as a team. I’m sure he wanted to bounce back this year. He works hard. He’s really committed to winning, and he cares a lot about being at his best…He’s been dominant this year.”

Although the stars of the Tampa Bay Lightning have rightly been dominating the awards conversations, MacKinnon is looking like a front-runner for his first Hart Trophy. His Avs have gone from a depressing bunch of misfits to an exciting young outfit featuring one of the most potent lines in the league. Colorado had a 10-game winning streak in January and by mid-season had already surpassed their point total for all of 2016-17. Even in the suffocating West, a playoff spot is within reach, and should the Avalanche clinch a post-season berth, it’d be their first time playing an 83rd game since 2013-14.

Of course, Colorado’s woes hadn’t strictly been about MacKinnon finding his inner peace. The Avalanche were just plain bad, and last season was rock bottom. “There’s a handful of guys from last season that aren’t even in the NHL anymore,” Johnson said. “We had a lot of older guys and a lot of younger guys, and it just wasn’t a very good fit. When things went downhill in December (three wins, 12 losses), we never recovered. There wasn’t enough jam in our group to right the ship. The group this year is much more tight-knit.”

While Colorado got off to a decent start this season, the mega-trade that sent Matt Duchene to Ottawa in a three-way deal with Nashville really cleared things up in Denver. It only makes sense that the uncertainty surrounding a star player who believed his time was up in town would weigh on his teammates. MacKinnon agreed with the sentiment, though he doesn’t blame Duchene personally, so much as the situation itself.

There’s no question now who runs the Colorado offense. MacKinnon flanked by heavy and talented wingers Gabriel Landeskog and Mikko Rantanen has been one of the NHL’s best units, ranking with Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov and Vladislav Namestnikov in Tampa and Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak in Boston. For the Avs’ trio, the key has been the line’s diversity. Rantanen can be a finisher or a setup man, while Landeskog plays a great two-way game. In MacKinnon, the line has a center who drags defensemen toward him because of his trademark speed, which creates space for everyone else.

Jared, who took over behind the Avalanche bench last season, is a big fan of MacKinnon’s new skating philosophy. “He’s a more dangerous 1-on-1 player now because he has mixed up his attack,” Bednar said. “Sometimes he’ll drive the ‘D’ deep in the zone and try to take it to the net, sometimes he pulls up and tries to cut to the middle of the ice and get into the interior to use his shot. We’re seeing him shoot and use the D-man as a screen a little more, but he’s also a threat to pull up and look for other guys on the ice.”

MacKinnon has been distributing the puck a lot better, too. Perhaps it’s because of the offensive weapons he now has as linemates, but he had already surpassed last season’s total of primary assists (25) with 27 by the All-Star Game. While there are no guarantees in the wild West, a playoff berth for Colorado this spring would really cement MacKinnon’s claim to MVP credentials. “I said it all along the past couple years, this guy can be as good as he wants,” Landeskog said. “There are no boundaries, he’s got all the tools. It’s just a matter of staying level-headed.”

Although it seemed like an agonizing past three seasons for MacKinnon, it’s amazing to think he’s only 22 years old. It hasn’t been that long since he was living with veteran goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere, trying to convince ‘Jiggy’ to let him blast hip-hop on their commute to the rink. MacKinnon is still a quiet presence in the dressing room, but after wins it’s almost guaranteed he’ll have celebratory rap tunes playing in the gym for the boys.

And if you’re looking for MacKinnon, there’s a good chance he’s at the gym or on the ice – he’s one of the first players out there for practice or morning skates. That commitment has allowed him to excel when it comes to the physical side of the game, and now he has the mental fortitude to make it all come together. “I can stick with the game longer now,” he said. “I don’t get down on myself as much and I trust my game more than I have in years past. I try to give my full attention to 60 minutes of hockey.”

With the passengers of the past gone, the Avalanche are finally starting to look like a dangerous team once again. While the front-office skills of franchise legendturned- GM Joe Sakic had been questioned heavily in the past, the return for the Duchene trade – multiple picks and prospects plus rookie puck-moving defenseman Samuel Girard – have turned that narrative on its head. Landeskog is just 25, Rantanen is but a sophomore and MacKinnon has entered his peak playing years with a forceful 2017-18 performance.

Winning at the highest level may take a little longer, but there’s a lot less losing in MacKinnon’s world right now. Kobe would be proud. 

The Philadelphia Flyers have shown flashes of strong play in the past two seasons, but they're still not likely to make the Stanley Cup playoffs this season. Still, in this cover story from THN's 2023 "Prospects Unlimited" issue, longtime Philly scribe Wayne Fish profiled the Flyers' impressive-looking future:

A NEW ERA OF ORANGE

By Wayne Fish

Everyone connected to the team was holding their collective breath. This was going to be their moment of truth. Would the Philadelphia Flyers, a team steeped in tradition and historical success, actually use a high first-round draft pick on a prospect they knew would not be playing in the NHL for several years? Could they go against their usual conventional wisdom of selecting a player who figured to help them quite soon, the way 2015 first-rounders Ivan Provorov and Travis Konecny did when they joined the NHL in 2016-17 as 19-year-olds?

This scene unfolded on June 28, the first night of the 2023 NHL draft at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, and new GM Daniel Briere had a big decision to make. Should he go for a prototypical Flyer such as, say, the rugged Ryan Leonard, who might be ready to compete in the NHL in a year or two? Or go with a prospect such as Russian-born whiz kid Matvei Michkov, who was already committed to playing the next few years in his native country?

The Flyers, mired in the second-longest non-playoff drought in their history – three years – knew choosing the second option would put their commitment to a total rebuild directly into the critics’ spotlight. Briere didn’t seem to care. With the blessing of new president of hockey operations Keith Jones, Briere decided to use the No. 7 overall pick on Michkov, a clear sign the Flyers are all-in on this franchise overhaul.

Further proof of this approach involved the trades, releases or departures through free agency of several other established veterans during the off-season. The Flyers parted with center Kevin Hayes by sending him to the St. Louis Blues, then shipped Provorov to Columbus in a three-way deal with Los Angeles.

They attempted to trade defenseman Tony DeAngelo, but when there were no takers, they simply bought him out from the second year of a two-year contract (he later signed with Carolina). And winger James van Riemsdyk, who had spent more than half of his career in Philadelphia, was allowed to leave via free agency and signed with Boston. Another defenseman, Justin Braun, retired from his NHL career to play a final year or two in Germany.

All these moves were made to open up bigger roles for some of the Flyers’ up-and-comers, such as defenseman Cam York, left winger Noah Cates, center Morgan Frost and right wingers Owen Tippett, Wade Allison and Tyson Foerster. Chuck Fletcher, the former president and GM of the team, was let go back in March. He had started this regeneration process, but the feeling seemed to be that things weren’t moving along quickly enough nor was there enough commitment to the rebuild. Briere, who had been a special advisor to Fletcher, was hired with a clear mandate to speed up and be more comprehensive with the process.

Plus, there were even changes at the very top of the organization. Dave Scott, former chairman of Spectacor and governor of the Flyers, decided to retire and was replaced by new CEO Daniel Hilferty at the end of the season. At a May press conference, Hilferty helped announce the team’s new motto, “A New Era of Orange.” The key word there being “new” for the team with the third-highest points percentage in league history.

Like many NHL teams, the Flyers were victims of enjoying one good season during the pandemic and then believing they were back to legitimate contender status. Back in the first shortened campaign of 2019-20, the Flyers finished the regular season on a hot stretch, having had a nine-game winning streak end just before all professional sports were shut down in March 2020. Somehow, they made it all the way to Game 7 of Round 2 before losing to the New York Islanders in a winner-take-all game. Things went downhill from there. Injuries and uncertainty behind the Flyers’ bench conspired to keep the team out of playoff contention since.

Veteran coach John Tortorella, an honest evaluator of talent young and old, was brought onboard last season to start the process of who should stay and who should go. He has helped to make some significant player-personnel moves, but there’s a sense there’s still more work to be done. While Flyers fans have a tendency to be impatient, the people in the organization insist there can be no shortcuts.

“I think patience is a key word,” Jones said. “It’s going to take some time. We have a plan. We (the leadership group) are going to get together and really work on that plan, and it’s probably going to take a little while. But we do have a little bit of time. The team made some strides last year. Two years ago, this was not a fun team to follow. I was in the same boat as the fans, covering it closely (as a TV analyst). I know our fans and have had many conversations with them. And that (failure) was not acceptable.”

Under Tortorella, the Flyers appeared to take a step in the right direction last year, and Jones wants to continue on that path. That could involve the development and possible promotion of prospects such as Elliot Desnoyers and Emil Andrae. “But we have more work to do,” Jones said. “How quickly we can get that done, it’s ultimately going to be about the players. Having some players in good health is a major plus for us, (Sean) Couturier and (Cam) Atkinson. But we’re in a position where we want to build certain areas of our team and continue to keep the strengths that are there, but there are spots that need a lot of work.”

Like with any rebuild, there has to be a lot of help in the pipeline, and that’s what the Flyers have been working on. Officials insist there’s no timeline on when the team might return to legitimate contention. The Flyers’ AHL affiliate, the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, made the playoffs for the first time last season since 2018. The decision to endorse Cutter Gauthier, the 2022 draft’s fifth-fifth-overall pick, in his plan to return to Boston College for a second year of NCAA play was an easy one.

From a personal standpoint, Briere knows all about “bouncing back” from the depths of the NHL. He signed with the Flyers as a free agent back in 2007, just after the team suffered what was arguably the worst season in franchise history. It took only one year to turn things around, and the Flyers went to the Eastern Conference final in 2008, losing to Pittsburgh. Two years later, the Flyers were in the Stanley Cup final themselves.

Last season, the Flyers were operating without top players Couturier and Atkinson (both sidelined by major surgeries). That may have rushed players such as Cates and Frost. This year, barring any injury setbacks, the Flyers should be in a position to employ their prospects more prudently, allowing the youngsters to see how it’s done from a different perspective.

“On the ice, it’s a big change,” Briere said. “We put a lot of stress on guys like Noah and Morgan last year because of that. I’m sure it was great for their development having to face top-six players all year long. But it’s going to be nice to give them a little bit of help and strengthen that position a little bit. Let them breathe a little bit.

“Experience-wise, I think it’s going to be great for their growth as well. On the ice, adding those two guys (Couturier and Atkinson) in the locker room is huge. Last year, we had a lot of young guys. Those (veteran) guys are going to help.”

One of the big off-season signings was bringing in veteran defenseman Marc Staal. He’ll help with the transition by tutoring some of the younger players. “You want to give the young guys a chance, and ‘Torts’ did a tremendous job of that last year,” Briere said. “But at the same time, you don’t want to put them in a position to fail. That’s the part that we have to gauge. Put them in positions so that they can grow.

“That’s exactly why we added a guy like Staal. We felt to help some of our defensemen after losing Provorov, adding a good veteran who can help cool the temperature at times. Understanding where he fits in, but at the same time, helping out our young D-men. There’s a lot of change. A lot of young guys stepped up last year, mostly on offense. Hopefully, we can see that a little more on the defense. At the end of the day, the players are going to decide that. We’re not just going to force them back into the lineup. We’re going to give them a chance to get their confidence back.”