Flyers

Watching the Florida Panthers Makes You Realize How Much Work the Flyers Have Yet to Do

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 29th, 2025 · 10:19 AM EDT

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This post isn’t to shit on the Flyers, because we’re optimistic about the rebuild and the slow and steady movement in the right direction, but I was sitting there Wednesday night watching the Panthers/Canes game and continuously saw things that made me say to myself, “There’s not a single Flyers player who can do that.” Things like this:

This is just such a great play by Barkov you literally just look at what he did and you say Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/Rw59IRe05q

— Rob Gucci (@heatdaddy69420) May 29, 2025

To be fair, there aren’t a lot of players in the entirety of the NHL who can do what Aleksander Barkov does. It’s not just the Flyers who are chasing. Everybody in the league is chasing. This is a Panthers team that’s going to the finals for the third year in a row. We’re talking dynasty stuff if they win it again this year, because most of their core is under contract through 2029 and they just have to navigate the free agency of Sam Bennett and Aaron Ekblad. Maybe Brad Marchand sticks around at age 38 and Bob gets an extension at some point soon. Otherwise, their main group is on the right side of age 30 and not showing any signs of slowing down.

So I had this stupid thought in my head, maybe influenced by what I had just watched, but I logged on to stupid social media anyway and proclaimed that there are at least seven Panthers players that would be better than the best current Flyers player. Of course, the Panthers are a perennial contender and one of the best teams we’ve seen in recent history, while the Flyers are in a rebuild, but still, you compare both rosters and look at the disparity and it’s a good exercise in showing just how far the Flyers have yet to go.

Namely:

• Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk, and Sam Reinhart would be the best players on the Flyers. No doubt about that.
• I think Sergei Bobrovsky would also be the best player on the Flyers roster. Most people here would agree that franchise goaltending is more important than any single skater, especially considering the Flyers’ historic shortcomings at the position.
• Anton Lundell is the Panthers’ third center, but he would be 1C on this Flyers team. Not sure he’s better straight up than Matty Michkov or Travis Konecny if situations were placed into a vacuum, but we’re talking about a guy who put up 45 regular season points with less than 17 minutes of ice time a night.
• Sam Bennett and Carter Verhaeghe have 16 and 14 points in these playoffs, respectively. Bennett is a 1C on a dozen other teams and Verhaeghe has 67 postseason points over the last five Panthers seasons. Not sure he’d be the single best player on the Flyers roster, but the level of clutchness is impossible to parse.
• When you to go defense, you have Gustav Forsling, Seth Jones, and Aaron Ekblad. Jones just got there and Ekblad and and Forsling aren’t Cale Makar and Zach Werenski-style point producers, but they’re steady and experienced and asking yourself how Travis Sanheim compares would be a good exercise for an esoteric Flyers podcast.

So maybe not “at least seven players” being better than every Flyer, but you could make a strong case for four or five.

Point being, the Panthers have 5-7 of these types of guys and the Flyers have maybe 1-2, depending on your individual opinions of Konecny and soon-to-be sophomore Michkov. Could Owen Tippett or Tyson Foerster have a 50-point season playing on one of these Panther lines? Yeah, absolutely. But if you take that group of Barkov, Tkachuk, Reinhart, Bennett, Bob, and Verhaeghe, that’s a half-dozen studs right there. Throw in Lundell and Marchand, and the postseasons they’re having, and the Panthers’ depth is outrageous. It’s really a good snapshot of where the Flyers are and where they need to be.