Early Evaluations of Daniel Brière’s First 3 Flyers Draft Classes

It’s almost June, which always brings two major events on the hockey calendar. The Stanley Cup Final takes center stage, of course, as the season’s pinnacle and the crowning of a champion. But for 30 teams, the month is more about what happens about a week later: the NHL Draft, held this year in Buffalo from June 26-27.

This will be Daniel Brière’s fourth draft class as general manager (GM) of the Philadelphia Flyers, the same number as his predecessor, Chuck Fletcher, and only one more than his predecessor, Ron Hextall. So, while three years isn’t nearly enough to draft conclusive assessments on a draft class (let alone two or one), it’s later in a GM’s tenure that you might expect. In fact, 14 current GMs have had fewer draft classes than Brière, and that number will rise to 15 once the Nashville Predators replace Barry Trotz.

Four of Brière’s draft picks, accounting for all but one of his first-rounders, suited up for the Flyers during their playoff run, a promising metric. Of course, it’s only one of many that can be used to evaluate Philadelphia’s prospect pool. The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler ranks the Flyers’ pipeline as the NHL’s eighth-best, largely based on Brière’s work (from “NHL prospect pool rankings 2026: Scott Wheeler’s evaluations of all 32 teams’ systems,” The Athletic, Apr. 8, 2026).

Then again, it would be pretty concerning if it weren’t in the top 10, given the first five and seven second-round picks he’s made. But if all continues going well, Brière will hopefully have many more picks to make, including (barring trades) five this year. Here’s a run-through of what his first three years at the draft podium have produced ahead of take four.

2023: High Ceiling

Brière’s first draft pick will go down as one of his most important. When Matvei Michkov was drafted seventh overall in 2023, it felt transcendent, a clear light at the end of a very dark tunnel the Flyers had stumbled down (especially when Cutter Gauthier was traded a few months later, making Michkov clearly the team’s top prospect). It’s even crazier to think that originally, the plan was for Michkov not to have made his NHL debut yet, with his Kontinental Hockey League contract running through the 2025-26 season.

Instead, he’s two years into his NHL career, with some high highs and low lows to show for it. He led rookies in goals in 2024-25 and the Flyers in points after the Olympics through the end of the 2025-26 regular season. There was also the two-game benching under John Tortorella in year one and the low usage in his first year under Rick Tocchet, culminating in a pair of playoff scratchings.

If you looked at Michkov’s production in a vacuum, it would be considered a pretty rousing success. The overall picture is a bit muddier, but there is still star potential in the 21-year-old. Whether he reaches it or not will be the biggest determining factor of the success of this draft.

A fairly close second factor will be how the two goaltenders from this class play out. It’s rare to draft goalies with consecutive picks, especially in the first three rounds. The last time the Flyers did that was 2015, and the optimistic view is that Carson Bjarnasson and Yegor Zavragin will likely exceed Felix Sandström and Matej Tomek’s output.

Zavragin is regarded as one of the league’s top netminding prospects, and Bjarnasson at least had a good first half to his inaugural pro season before struggling down the stretch in the American Hockey League (AHL). The third round duo of Zavragin and Denver Barkey looks extremely promising and could be two of the franchise’s biggest steals in recent history.

One of the ledes was admittedly buried as the Flyers made two first-round picks, adding defenseman Oliver Bonk 23rd overall. A dip in his Ontario Hockey League (OHL) scoring from his draft-plus-one to draft-plus-two season and pre-season injury were a bit concerning. However, it felt like Bonk was back on the top-four development track by the end of the year, to the point that the Flyers trusted him in a second-round playoff game.

Even the late-round picks have some promise. Cole Knuble has been one of the top scorers at Notre Dame the last two seasons and could make it in the bottom six. Carther Sotheran is intriguing on the backend, as the fifth-rounder more than doubled his OHL point production, tallying 72 in 67 games. When you have a draft class that’s deep and features high-end talent, there’s a lot to love.

2024: World Junior Success

After making the team’s top two first-round picks as they fell in 2023, Brière has moved around in the first-round order each of the last two years. In 2024, it was a one-spot trade down, declining to take Zeev Buium while attempting to address the team’s center need with speedster Jett Luchanko.

Luchanko had a solid draft-plus-one season: he made the Flyers out of camp, scored at a solid clip in the OHL, and had six assists in seven playoff games with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms in the AHL. But his offense fell off after a midseason trade to the Brantford Bulldogs, and he finished with just seven goals in 38 OHL games, reinforcing concerns about being too pass-first. There’s still lots of development in front of him, and Buium hasn’t smashed it, either. But it’s fair to wonder a bit here.

How much stock you hold in the World Juniors will likely determine how sold you are on the rest of the class. Jack Berglund, one of the team’s two second-round picks, was tied with likely 2026 top-five pick Ivar Stenberg as Sweden’s leading scorer with 10 points in seven games. Just behind him on the overall leaderboard was fourth rounder Heikki Ruohonen, who topped Finland with nine points.

Fellow second-rounder Spencer Gill has dealt with injuries, with the defenseman limited to just 11 games in 2025-26. Fifth-rounder Noah Powell signed his entry-level contract after an unspectacular season at Arizona State. The Flyers had three top-10 picks this year compared to five in the year prior, so if this draft seems more measured, that’s a big reason why. But there definitely isn’t as much high-end talent here, either.

2025: Martone Shines, But How Much More?

It already seems like the Flyers have a home run on their hands with Porter Martone. He followed up an excellent campaign at Michigan State with a spectacular start to his NHL career in the regular season and playoffs. It’s all sunshine and roses so far for the sixth overall pick.

Martone alone could be enough to carry a draft class, but with the Flyers making six top-60 picks, they need to come out with more. Brière took a bold gamble by trading picks 22 and 31 to the Pittsburgh Penguins of all teams to once again prioritize center by selecting Jack Nesbitt at 12th overall. His OHL production didn’t jump this season, but he did stay later than expected at training camp back in the fall. We’ll see how he makes the jump to the University of Michigan before future judgment.

The quartet of second-round picks, meanwhile, didn’t get out of the gates strong. Carter Amico went pointless in 18 games at Boston University before going back down to the United States Hockey League (USHL). Jack Murtagh and Shane Vansaghi had 11 points apiece as freshmen, showing just how impressive Martone’s 1.4 point-per-game pace truly is. And Matthew Gard failed to make a similar offensive leap to the jump he took from 2023-24 to 2024-25 — or much of any jump, really.

This is where it’s worth circling back to that point in the introduction again. We still don’t know everything about the players drafted in 2023, let alone the ones taken 11 months ago. All of those four second-rounders are still teenagers; in fact, Murtagh’s still 18. And to end this section on a positive note, sixth-rounder Nathan Quinn was tied for 10th in the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League with 34 goals in 58 games. The small sample size does apply on the other end, though.

2026: What’s to Come?

If the Flyers don’t make any trades, they’re set to make the fewest picks in the first two rounds (two) and total (five) of Brière’s tenure. That’s keeping things warm for a deep 2027 arsenal, with potentially five top-100 picks if the Toronto Maple Leafs’ first-rounder owed to Philadelphia is transferred in 2027 and not 2028.

Brière has taken a forward with his first pick every draft and on four of his five first-rounders, so it may be time to stock up on defense with Bonk close to graduating to the NHL and some concerns about the two defensemen he’s drafted in the second round (Gill and Amico). Michkov is his lone first-round pick from outside the OHL, although Martone and Nesbitt have/will get some NCAA experience, too.

This probably won’t come into play until at least the third round, but the Flyers haven’t taken a goalie since drafting Bjarnasson and Zavragin in 2023. They don’t need to take one with those two and Aleksei Kolosov in the system, but the Flyers have never gone three straight drafts without taking a goalie.