Flyers

NHL Draft 2025: There’s Absolutely No Way the Flyers Screw this Up

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jun 27th, 2025 · 1:52 PM EDT

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One of the nice things about Friday night’s NHL draft is that we’re not going to have an argument about the Philadelphia Flyers’ macro-level strategy.

Should they take the best player available, or fill a position of need? The premise of the question is not applicable because the Flyers need help everywhere. They need goaltenders, centers, defensemen, and wingers.

So when you look through the mock drafts and big boards you feel like they can’t screw this up, right? You could blindfold yourself and throw a dart at a dartboard and walk away with a solid prospect. There is no way we suffer a repeat of 2017, when the Flyers drafted the only guy in the top five who turned out NOT to be an All Star. Surely Danny Briere and Brent Flahr and Keith Jones (Jonesy) are leading us out of the Nolan Patrick dark ages and further into a luminescent era of orange.

With the 6th overall pick, the Flyers are going to have a shot at one of these guys, realistically:

• Caleb Desnoyers (C)
• Brady Martin (C)
• James Hagens (C)
• Roger McQueen (C)
• Porter Martone (RW)
• Anton Frondell (C) (iffy)
• Radim Mrtka (D)
• Jake O’Brien (C)

The only guys who we can safely say will not be available are defenseman Matthew Schaefer and center Michael Misa, who are mocked 1 and 2 on just about every list out there. Frondell is commonly found at #3 overall and then it turns into a bit of a crapshoot from there.

Reddit user XVash2 did the lord’s work for all of us, analyzing 30 mock drafts across North American media and parsing the results. Here are the top three mocked to the Flyers:

• Hagens and Desnoyers (tied) – eight times mocked to Flyers (23.54% each)
• Martone (third) – six times mocked to the Flyers (17.65%)

Unless the Flyers do like Martone, and make him the pick, the scenario is going to be them simply picking their preferred center. In that case, Hagens is a little smaller, 5’11” and 176 pounds at Boston College, while Desnoyers is 6’2″ and around the same weight. They are both 18 years old. Hagens was at one point the top draft prospect, but his freshman season at BC was a little quieter than some had anticipated. He had 11 goals and 26 assists in 37 games, which is still a full point-per-game production. Desnoyers is with the Moncton Wildcats in the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) and the scouts like his hockey sense and passing skill. One of the profiles I read compared him to both Sean Couturier and Jonathan Toews. Roger McQueen is 6’5″ and almost 200 pounds at age 18, a much bigger guy, and Jake O’Brien is a 6’2″ righty with Brantford in the OHL. If they do want to go larger at center, those guys fit the bill, but they aren’t being mocked to the Flyers with frequency.

Ultimately, it does not matter what we think or the scouts think. The Flyers have the pick, and unless they make some unfathomable reach for a guy mocked outside the top-8 or top-10, then you imagine fans will be happy with whatever they end up doin, unless they have very specific thoughts on what type of center they need to draft. But again, they need everything. They need to stuff the prospect pipeline like one of Russ Joy’s fried mozzarella sticks at Sheetz. The ideal situation, in my mind, is if they pick the best player available at 6 and then package those Colorado and Edmonton picks at the end of the first round and move up for someone they like. Let’s start using those picks to stock the cupboard, because the corner needs to be turned. Let’s get Flyered up as we enter the fun part of the rebuild.