Hopefully this is the first of many Chuck Fletcher moves ahead of Friday’s deadline:

Ratcliffe was the 35th pick in the cursed 2017 draft. For as much as we talk about Cale Makar, Miro Heiskanen, Elias Pettersson, and the Nolan Patrick whiff, Ratcliffe ended up going a few picks before Jason Robertson, who has 73 points right now (and is only 23 years old). What a slam dunk draft that was for Dallas.

Ratcliffe only ended up playing 10 games here. He got the call last season when injuries were killing the team, and played on the fourth line for a bit. That’s about it.

Hopefully Fletcher is prepared to sell, sell, sell this week. It’s a fire sale. Everyone is available. 0% down, no payment for 36 months at Barbera’s on the Boulevard. We will take draft picks, future considerations, and any assets possible. Tear it all down. The only thing we should be aggressively retooling is 85% of  the roster.

Here’s a blurb from Ant San Francisco:

Ratcliffe was just another failed higher round draft pick of the Ron Hextall era. A second round selection in the infamous 2017 draft where Hextall went rogue and ignored his scouts recommendations of a defenseman (Miro Heiskanen, although some scouts liked Cale Makar) and selected Nolan Patrick, Ratcliffe was supposed to be a prototypical power forward who could score. Instead, his awkward skating and lack of jump made him look even slower and he never really produced offensively.

While the Flyers did get NHL-caliber players in the first two rounds of Hextall’s drafts, with the exception of Carter Hart, none have developed into top-tier players or appear to still be on track to be stars. Travis Konecny is close, but still inconsistent enough to be the next step down. Travis Sanheim and Ivan Provorov are NHL defensemen, sure, but Provorov is at best a No. 2 and Sanheim is better suited on a second or third pairing. The jury is still out on Joel Farabee, but he definitely seems to be a useful middle six forward, but the rest of Hextall’s picks in those crucial early rounds have bombed. Patrick is out of hockey. Ratcliffe played 10 games for the Flyers last season, and has really been a disappointment with the Phantoms. Nick Aube-Kubel has bounced around the league and is a fourth line player. German Rubtsov and Pascal LaBerge were both big swings and misses. Wade Allison has been OK, but really just another depth guy. The Flyers still aren’t sure if Morgan Frost is worth keeping (I’m betting they don’t, because he’s not). Jay O’Brien was just a terrible choice and Adam Ginning was another miss.

That’s just an awful track record and a good picture as to why the Flyers are in the position they are in currently. You just can’t miss this badly this often and expect to be competitive.