The Flyers were on a heater for a bit, then fell into a pit of back-to-back losses, snapped out of it for a night against the Devils at home, then fell right back into it by way of consecutive blankings.
They'll take two steps forward, a step back, another forward, then another two back.
It's just the nature of the team they have constructed right now, which up until Thursday night, had them walking a line between the basement of the Eastern Conference standings and staying afloat within what's been a mediocre Wild Card race so far.
General manager Danny Brière made a move to shift that nature though, which was made official in the early hours of Friday morning.
Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost, two former first-round picks and longtime faces of the team, but ones who never fully broke out into their potential, were traded to the Calgary Flames.
Coming back to the Flyers were Russian winger Andrei Kuzmenko, Calgary's former first-round forward Jakob Pelletier, a second-round pick in the 2025 draft this summer, and a seventh-round pick in 2028.
No salary was retained by either side.
It's a shakeup, for sure. Two relatively younger players (Frost is 25 and Farabee will turn 25 next month) who do have skill and were well-liked within the locker room, they're suddenly not a part of the long-term picture anymore.
But what does that mean, and where do the Flyers go next with that? A few thoughts…
They're worse now
That's the immediate impact of this trade.
Frost and Farabee both hit frustrating ceilings in Philly, but say what you want about them, they are good players who still had their ways of helping the team in the here and now.
Frost, though inconsistent, was one of the Flyers' more offensively skilled centers on a team starved for depth at the position. Taking him out of the equation now leaves the Flyers with Sean Couturier, Noah Cates, Scott Laughton, and for the time being, Rodrigo Ābols while Ryan Poehling is out with injury.
That's hardly a fearsome group up the middle.
Farabee was also a strong, puck-possessing winger at even strength, but his problem was that his production in terms of sheers numbers took a sharp drop off this season, and really, going back to the middle of last, too.
Farabee only had eight goals and 19 points on the season before the trade, and had a career-best 22 goals and 50 points last year. The thing is, by the end, it hardly ever felt like that.
Still, and at minimum, Frost and Farabee have carved out enough to be clear middle-six NHL forwards, which the Flames appear to have wanted and what will hurt the Flyers on-ice now that they're not there anymore.
It's enough to say clearly that, to this point in the season, they're not actively interested in chasing after one of the two Wild Card spots in East, of which they now sit five points out from following Thursday night's shutout loss to the Islanders.
The team on the ice is still going to go out there and try to compete night after night – John Tortorella won't let it be any other way – but this is a tank move for the rest of this year on the part of Brière and the front office.
They'll be looking at draft positioning, especially now that they're set to have 13 picks this summer and seven within the first two rounds alone.
They're clearing up space, too
Farabee was under contract through 2028 at an annual cap hit of $5 million, and the Flyers just got fully out from under that in the deal with Calgary.
Kuzmenko is coming in with a $5.5 million cap hit, but doing so on an expiring two-year deal. The Flyers will have him off the books after this season, and in the event the soon-to-be 29-year-old winger gives them reason to keep him around a bit longer, he probably won't fetch that kind of price tag again.
Pelletier is 23, only costs $800K and will be under team control for a couple of years.
Frost got offloaded at $2.1 million with another summer of arbitration eligibility on the horizon.
The Flyers made themselves a bit of room with their cap, not a lot of it, but some space, and conveniently, right before word got out Friday that NHL is expecting to have its cap ceiling raise significantly over the next three seasons.
The NHL and NHLPA are forecasting significant salary cap bumps on the current $88M ceiling in the coming years. It's a great time to be hitting free agency.
2025-26: $95.5M
2026-27: $104M
2027-28: $113.5M— Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) January 31, 2025
There's also the expectation that the Flyers won't be done, since there's still a ways to go until the March 7 trade deadline.
So what comes next?
Rasmus Ristolainen has had his trade buzz and that's likely not going to quiet down over the next few weeks.
His defensive play and physicality have improved dramatically within the past two years, putting him a far cry away from the advanced stats whipping boy he used to be back in Buffalo, and he's one of the Flyers' three current plus-rated defensemen (Cam York and Nick Seeler are the other two), even while on a team that's buried in a minus-27 goal differential.
Ristolainen's $5.1 million cap hit also doesn't seem to be the cause for fear it once was, especially since a team would only be on the hook for it for two more years after this season, which is arguably very manageable now with the current strength of his play.
Ristolainen seems to have finally found his game under Tortorella and defensive specialist Brad Shaw, and at this time of year as competing teams try to gear up for the playoffs, they tend to love themselves some bigger, tougher defenseman.
So there's a perceived haul for down the road that the Flyers could stand to gain from Ristolainen, who in a few ways, is shaping up to be a lot like what Sean Walker was at the deadline last season.
Scott Laughton's name could still be in play, too, as it's been for the past couple of years now.
The veteran has been vocal about wanting to stay, and he's also long been a valuable voice in the room when it comes to the team's culture, but the Flyers have always maintained that if they get a good enough offer, they do have to act.
Plus at this time of year, playoff and Stanley Cup hopefuls do tend to love their hard-checking, bottom-six culture guys as well.
They still really need a center
Woefully so.
Do they go for Pettersson?
Which makes it hard to ignore what's been going on in Vancouver of late.
Rumors had been going around for a couple of months that there was a rift between the Canucks' top two centers, veteran J.T. Miller and young star Elias Pettersson, but then Vancouver's president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford outright told The Globe and Mail this week that the issue is real, it's not salvageable, and it's affecting the team.
One or both have to go.
And you do have to wonder: Could and should the Flyers help with that?
When it comes to Miller, no. He's 31, under contract for $56 million until he's 37, and for his reported role in the rift, would basically just saddle the Flyers with a different, more volatile version of Kevin Hayes.
Pettersson, though, that could be something, albeit difficult to pull off.
He's still relatively young at 26, so he'd be around for a long time, and even though he'd be much more expensive on an eight-year, $92.8 million deal that just started, he's flashed a mid-high 30s goal-scoring ability in the prior three seasons, which could be huge to put alongside Michkov despite Pettersson's struggles so far this year.
Brière, who spoke with the local media in Voorhees last week about the state of the Flyers at the midway point of the season, said he remains aware of the team's extreme need for a high-end center and that they are looking.
In full, the GM said at the time:
"We've tried, and we're trying, and we're looking at what's out there. The reality is there's not a lot of high-end centermen in this league and when teams have them, they want to keep them, or the price is crazy. We're not willing to give up on our future at this point.
"Yes, I realize that it's a glaring need and we'd like to upgrade, but it has to make sense…
"I understand, you guys want some work and you'd like to have a trade to keep you busy, but the reality is if we force something, after two weeks we can't press undo and then start from scratch again, so we gotta be sure before we make a move. But believe me, we're trying. We're looking at everything that's out there, that is available. We're even asking questions on some guys that aren't available, just to check in and to make sure."
But the situation in Vancouver and the opportunity to possibly pull Pettersson out of it might be the right chance and the risky kind of big swing to move in on.
As Brière alluded to a week ago, there aren't a lot of top centers around, and teams don't often make them available.
However, Vancouver has fallen into a tough circumstance where there might really be a decent shot at one, provided the Flyers can get a bit creative in a pursuit.
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