Flyers Should Take a Chance on Patrik Laine

Three weeks into free agency, Montreal Canadiens free agent forward Patrik Laine is still unsigned, and the North American reports have settled into a loop. He gets attached to a team, that team signs somebody else, the cycle starts again. Los Angeles Kings. Tampa Bay Lightning. Minnesota Wild. Buffalo Sabres – there is no shortage of teams to throw out.

The Finnish media has been running a different story, and it is one I prefer. Yle Urheilu published a piece asking whether Laine will have to agree to a professional tryout (PTO) to find work. Tommi Seppälä could not get any usable reports from veteran North American insiders. One of them told Yle he had heard almost nothing, and floated the PTO idea unprompted.

Karri Rämö, Yle’s hockey analyst and a former NHL goaltender, thinks a tryout is possible. He also thinks Laine would hate it, and would likely only agree to it if he is still unsigned close to training camp. But buried in the same segment is the most specific case anyone has made about where Laine should land, a team nobody in the English-language press has connected to him: the Philadelphia Flyers.

Three Filters For Laine’s Next Contract

Any Laine contract has to include three things. It has to be one year at a low number. Nobody’s committing term to a player coming off a season of five games and one assist, and nobody’s paying within shouting distance of the $8.7 million he was making annually. That was settled in June.

The second factor is where North American rumors start to break down. Laine can’t be a depth signing. His value runs through offensive-zone starts and first-unit power play time, and he’s never been the sort of winger who produces when moved down the lineup to fix his defensive numbers. Put him on a third line to protect the results, and you’ve paid for a player you can’t use. Rämö put it harshly when he noted: there’s nothing Laine gives you from the bottom six.

Third, and this is the one clubs won’t say out loud, whatever team signs him has to let him play the way he plays. Laine’s game has always been a trade-off. You accept chances against in exchange for a shot nobody else on your roster has. A coach who tries to sand off the first half of that bargain also loses the second half. As Rämö suggested, an organization has to accept what Laine is rather than try to convert him into something safer.

With those filters in mind, Rämö landed on a physical team that needs a power-play shot, that’s on the way up, and young enough that the culture isn’t set. The Flyers seem to check all of those boxes.

Finnish media isn’t unanimous about it. Ismo Lehkonen, Yle’s other regular NHL voice and the head coach at TUTO Hockey, wants Laine on a power play too but puts him on the Lightning. I think that Finland’s two most-quoted analysts are arguing about the fit instead of the price. The English conversation has mostly been a list of teams with cap space.

Bonus Loophole to Sign Laine

Some cap space shenanigans would allow him to fit on the Flyers. Article 50.2(b)(i)(C)(2) lets a player with 400-plus NHL games who spent 100 or more days on injured reserve in the final year of his previous contract sign a one-year deal carrying performance bonuses. That structure normally belongs to entry-level players and veterans 35 and over. Laine, 28, qualifies. He cleared the threshold by sitting on injured reserve through Montreal’s run to the third round of the 2026 Playoffs.

The new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), which clears on September 16, 2026, adds a second route for players who spent the last 70 days of the season on injured reserve and played no more than two playoff games. Laine clears both versions, so whenever he signs, the structure is available.

In practice, that means a base salary of roughly $2 million with $3 million to $4 million in incentives stacked on top. Bonuses don’t eat cap space during the season unless a club’s total potential bonuses clear 7.5 percent of the ceiling, which works out to $7.8 million against this year’s $104 million cap. Anything earned that pushes a team over that mark becomes an overage charge the following year, with the cap likely going up to $113.5 million in 2027-28 anyway.

Flyers’ Missing Piece

Philadelphia won 43 games and finished with 98 points last season, third in the Metropolitan, and returned to the playoffs for the first time since 2019-20 after clinching their berth against the Carolina Hurricanes on April 13. They scored 240 goals in 82 games, which ranked 21st in the league, and the reason is evident quickly. Their power play finished at 15.7 percent, dead last in the NHL, and it had been buried at 30th since mid-January. Go back to 2021-22 and no team in the league has been worse over that span. In the playoffs, it got worse still, 2 for 21.

Laine isn’t a five-on-five fix. His value comes on the power play, where his right-handed one-timer still changes the way penalty kills have to defend. The Flyers have spent the last two years searching for that weapon internally without finding it.

Still, Matvei Michkov led the team with 22 points in 26 games after the Olympic break. Porter Martone put four goals and ten points in his first nine NHL games after joining the team in March, and Philadelphia averaged 3.67 goals per game with him in the lineup against 2.93 across the season. A forward group that improves that much in the second half without adding anyone is a group one skill piece short of taking the next step.

Then there’s the general manager. Danny Briere tendered Leo Carlsson a five-year, $90 million offer sheet in early July, and watched the Anaheim Ducks match it to keep his four first-round picks, and said afterward that the goal hadn’t changed and the Flyers would keep chasing anything that made the roster better. A GM who just tried to hand $18 million a year to a center he had no rights to isn’t going to blink at $2 million and incentives on a winger who once scored 44 goals.

Reasons Laine Won’t Fit

I’d rather lose this argument honestly than win it by leaving things out, and the best case against Philadelphia isn’t about the team at all. Ismo Lehkonen put the decision on Laine on the Kalju Corner podcast this month, and I think he’s right.

Laine is an NHL-caliber player. But it’s hard to score with poor conditioning, and the question is whether he trained himself into elite shape after December, when he was out of the Canadiens’ lineup with nothing to do but get in shape. If clubs aren’t certain he did, that uncertainty will be the biggest liability, and whatever team finally makes him an offer will want to verify it first. Three weeks of silence seems more like due diligence rather than indecision.

The NHL schedule has increased to 84 games this season, under the new CBA, and begins on Sept. 29, the longest regular season since 1993-94. A scoring-line role means roughly 18 minutes a night. Laine hasn’t reached 60 games in six years and has played 75 total across the last three seasons. Nobody is asking him to survive a full campaign.

Head coach Rick Tocchet is where the third filter gets tested. Tocchet said on the PHLY Flyers podcast in February that Michkov “did not come into camp in shape,” and that it’s hard to play yourself into shape.

The forward group is filling up too. Briere gave Tyson Foerster eight years at $7.1 million per season on July 1, off 17 points in 29 games, then extended Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale two days apart in mid-July. Barkey, Foerster, Konecny, Martone, Michkov and Tippett are six wingers for four top-six spots. The seat I think Laine should take isn’t empty.

The Philadelphia Fit

I still land on Philadelphia. The Flyers have the power-play hole to fill, a GM who’s already shown what he’ll spend money, a forward group that got better on its own last spring, a contract structure that makes the downside close to free, and a moveable Finn in the doorway.

The rest depends on something none of us can see yet: what Laine will look like when camp opens. Lehkonen is right that the answer was never turning up in a rumor column. It turns up in a fitness test nobody has run yet.