Yes, Jett Luchanko should make Flyers
The evidence strongly indicates that this will happen. The question that has racked everyone’s mind and sparked legitimate debate is: should Jett Luchanko making the Flyers happen?
I’m here to say: yes, absolutely.
In fact, I will go a step further. There is no credible argument against this happening. Every argument that is raised in opposition to this happening simply does not pass the sniff test. They simply are not arguments that are suitably buttressed by evidence or sound reason. Often, they are demolished by the use of either.
They are arguments that make sense on their face. At first glance, they seem rational. However, they are universally seated upon the rotted foundation of false premises.
Such as…
Jett Luchanko still needs to develop his game.
- This is a true statement. Jett Luchanko still must develop his game in order to reach his peak prowess as an NHLer. The common points of argument are that he needs to develop his finishing ability and his offensive decision making. To further solidify the case, they will cite two quotes from both Brent Flahr and Riley Armstrong.
Brent Flahr said this in July: “I think sometimes you get a little too focused on defense. I think he can free himself up, especially with his speed and whatnot, he can probably take a few more chances. I would expect to see a significant improvement on his production.”
And he isn’t wrong. You’ve successfully made the case that Jett Luchanko needs to develop. However, when making this argument, people attach a clause to it that doesn’t need to be attached. They slip in a false premise.
“He still needs to develop his game, so he shouldn’t make the NHL.”
That is absolute nonsense. Are you telling me that you can’t develop your game in the NHL? Well, if that is the case, then what on God’s green earth are the Flyers doing? If this is true, then they are finished! They have NO chance of ever being anything worth following, and fans should immediately tune out.
Jamie Drysdale needs to have his entire NHL game overhauled. Everything that occurs when he isn’t skating with the puck on his stick? It needs to be entirely reworked from the ground up, and Tortorella is confident they can do that. He doesn’t even rule out the possibility that it can happen quickly.
This is what he said on October 1st:
“Jamie’s healthy. You can see his skating. Ton of work to do with him as far as how you play the game. Ton of work.”
“Jamie Drysdale is one–as I’ve said to you guys–that I think is an important guy for us. Because I… I don’t think he knows how to play. Not that he doesn’t play hard. We gotta teach him how to play the game. Such a young guy that hasn’t played a lot in the National Hockey League. That’s on us to teach him that part of the game.”
I want you to tell me this. How in the hell are we going to teach Jamie Drysdale the entire game of hockey, but we can’t get Jett to work with a shooting coach or make a couple of different decisions in the offensive zone? That doesn’t make sense.
This isn’t a matter of personal opinion. If you can teach the entire game of hockey to someone in the NHL, then you can teach a couple of granular details.
The Flyers might say that they believe Drysdale was rushed to the NHL, but they also never said that Drysdale being rushed to the NHL killed his opportunity to develop. They don’t believe it did. You know how I can know that for certain? Because they traded for Drysdale while he had a sports hernia, and they traded their 5th overall selection in 2022 to do it.
If you don’t believe me… if you don’t believe that you can develop in the NHL, neither Jett nor Jamie can do it… I have examples.
In fact, if you think things like your finishing in the NHL is something that you cannot improve, I’m going to take you on a journey. I’m going to tell you a story. The story of Nathan MacKinnon.
Nathan MacKinnon made the NHL at the age of 18. As a first overall pick, there was a lot less dramatics behind it. Regardless, MacKinnon had a mountain to climb between where he started in the league and where he is now. What are the changes that he made? Well, they might sound a little familiar. Almost like a roadmap.
When MacKinnon was 18, he really only knew one pace: breakneck. Ludicrous speed was the only gear that he had. He was always a generational athlete, with skating to match McDavid and power to surpass all but the bulkiest power forwards. He just had no idea how to maximize his gifts through skill and sense. He had never needed to before the NHL.
As an 18 year old rookie, Nathan MacKinnon attempted 388 shots and landed 241 shots on net. He converted 24 of those shots into goals for a modest 10% shooting percentage.
That would be his peak for the next few years. He would go on to shoot 7%, 8%, and 6% respectively over those three seasons. And then he exploded.
In his age-22 season, MacKinnon scored 39 goals and converted on his shots at a 13.7% rate. What happened?
He developed his finishing in the NHL!
We even know how he did it through Daryl Belfry, the skills coach for Nathan and many other NHL stars.
Belfry described numerous mechanical corrections they made to Nathan’s shooting ability, but the most important thing was never actually changing the way he shot. No, the most important thing was changing the shots he took.
MacKinnon used his physical gifts to back off defenders on the rush at will. The problem was that he only had one move. He would rush as fast as he could to try and get behind the defenseman, even if the defenseman was backing off of him and giving him a wide berth.
MacKinnon would get to the net plenty of times, but in the process, he would actually choke himself off at the net. Landing at the net is one thing. But landing at the net in a place that you can finish? That’s the difficult part.
That instinctive spatial awareness is something that MacKinnon lacked as an 18 year old. He would try so hard to get behind the defender that he would tunnel vision and fail to see any other option. He’s so gifted that he would still beat NHL defenders to the net, but he wouldn’t beat them there with space to score.
When NHL defenders played off of him, he needed an answer. The answer was actually really simple. At least, in theory. Instead of bull-rushing an NHL defenseman with a wide gap, as was his wont, he would just cutback and turn a wide gap even wider. That cutback or pullup would provide him with a wealth of space in front of him, and with that wealth of space, he had all day to decide what play he wanted to make. In practice, this is all incredibly complex.
MacKinnon first needed to learn when to cutback and when to drive by an NHL defender. He needed to teach himself different cues to read in his defender. He needed to teach himself ways to measure the gap, and ergo which decision was best.
Once he mastered that read, he needed to master a second and more difficult read. With his newfound space in the event of a delay play, he needed to become a severe threat to the defense. That meant he couldn’t just pull up and declare victory.
He needed to go through a progression of reads similar to an NFL quarterback. Whether that was finding the trailing defenseman on a play, or finding a pass to a forward rushing at the net with a better gap than him. Whether that was walking the blueline and attempting to setup a shot into traffic, or whether that was waiting for the defender to pressure him again, so he could drive by on the follow-up attempt.
Did I successfully convey how complex this was? MacKinnon learned all of that as an NHLer who debuted at 18, and he learned all of it between the ages of 19 and 22. Yes, it was a process. But the NHL didn’t stop him from embarking on that journey. He didn’t need to go develop in Guelph.
MacKinnon taught himself an entire tree of reads that meant no matter what decision an NHL defender makes, he’s wrong.
That’s the secret sauce behind turning a 50 point player into a 100 point player. And he did more, other extreme forms of development that turned him from a 50 point player into a 140 point player.
He went from someone who refused to take a one-timer on a power-player to one of the league’s premiere power-play shooting threats, and that leap happened as late as this season.
You absolutely can develop in the NHL. When you say “Jett still has room to develop,” you don’t automatically make the argument that “Jett shouldn’t make the NHL.”
That is nonsensical.
Now, perhaps a more interesting discussion is… is the NHL the best place to develop? Or, at worst, is it a comparable place to develop? To do this, we have to get very specific about what development looks like for Jett Luchanko.
First, we’ll go over his strengths so we can then go into his areas for improvement. At which point, we will decide if this process is feasible in the NHL. First, I feel like it’d be helpful to show what Luchanko was in juniors so we aren’t basing our whole opinion off of preseason games.
The standout skill of Jett Luchanko is creating interior offense. Anything occurring in the netfront or the slot? He is responsible for that. It can be his passing, where he is both a high volume creator of slot chances and carries a high efficiency on those passes. That held true even when the kid was 16 years old. He’s always had this vision for unlocking the slot, even before he had much of anything else to speak of.
That quickly became an eye for individual scoring chances at the slot. He has become very adept at finding chances at the netfront, which is why his individual expected goal rate is so high while his shots on goal rate was dead average. He’s the inverse of Owen Tippett. All he knows how to do is find the net.
The area you needed to see him develop was his transition numbers, even in juniors. This was why I torched the pick, initially. I am, by nature, highly skeptical of people with this skating ability who aren’t elite at creating transition offense in freaking juniors by their draft year. It usually means they can’t find the plays required to drive transition play in the NHL.
Generally, there’s a tracking stat that allows you to identify this. Controlled exit/entry rel% is the amount of times a player opts for a controlled exit or entry relative to the rest of their team. As you can see, Jett actually graded quite well here. The delta in the rate at which Jett opted for controlled plays vs. Guelph was quite strong.
I retained my skepticism because Guelph opted for controlled plays… essentially never. So, if Jett did it rarely, that meant the delta… or the gap in this frequency… would be high. Yet it wouldn’t tell us if Luchanko had the problem solving skills to drive transition results.
His draft-1 data was more compelling, however. Guelph wasn’t quite the enemy of transition play that it was the next year. It made the bar for Luchanko to clear in this relative choice dataset higher. And despite being a 16 year old, Luchanko opted for controlled plays a lot. Hell, he opted for controlled plays out of the defensive zone… which is more risk intensive… at an astronomical rate.
And despite this astronomical rate of avoiding dump-ins for controlled exits as a 16 year old, Luchanko’s success rate was still right about average despite being so underdeveloped.
Suffice to say, there was strong evidence that he was indeed a problem solver on the ice before he ever came into Flyers camp. But the tape matters.
If Luchanko came into camp against NHL and AHL level competition, and he no longer looked like an adept problem solver, then I would want him to see Guelph. He clearly would not be ready. However? That core of his game is in tact!
Here’s a defensive zone shift against the Bruins.
It only becomes a defensive zone shift because MacDonald’s stick inexplicably explodes in his hand. Otherwise, right at the start, Luchanko created either a controlled entry or a forechecking opportunity by picking that loose puck out of his skates and finding the pass behind his back to his defenseman.
Later, after the mess that was his shift, you can see his work in the defensive zone and the rate at which he finds his marks and blankets them. I’m more impressed by the way he intercepts a loose puck from a Bruin and immediately shifts to turning away from pressure to find a precise pass up the middle of the ice for a controlled exit.
That’s the stuff you need him to still be doing. He still needs to be touching the puck with confidence, and he is.
In truth, it’s Bobby Brink… the playmaker… who fails to hit Jett for a potential middle-lane zone entry, and instead opts to sky-mail that puck to Narnia which elongates the defensive zone shift after Luchanko leaves the ice.
Next, I want to look at another area that Luchanko had developed from horrific to underwhelming: cross-lane plays. They’re no more complicated than they sound. They’re plays in transition, usually passes, that cross from one horizontal lane to another. It’s measuring the “east-west” creativity in your game.
Here’s Luchanko in a greater competition level than he’s ever been before finding a cross-lane play that he didn’t even find in Guelph:
He’s been doing this all through camp!
Allow me to suggest that Jett’s problems in transition wasn’t actually a lack of ability. Allow me to suggest that Jett’s problems in transition was… Guelph. His team was horrific, and he had to scratch and claw for every single puck touch.
Once he touched the puck, he usually ended up going warp speed and simply leaving his teammates in the dust. Between that speed and the lack of real structure in Guelph, there were no cross-lane plays to make… so he never made them. Now that they’re available to be made? He’s making them!
Now, this isn’t to suggest that there isn’t still development opportunity. But it’s to elucidate how granular this development actually is, and how hard I find it to believe that it can’t be done in the NHL.
Here’s a good example from the rookie game:
Luchanko plays this 2 on 2 rush too fast. He misreads his defender and selects a dangle that couldn’t possibly work, and wastes an opportunity created out of thin air by the Russian prodigy’s ridiculous puck skill. That’s fine. You know who else loved to play too fast and select faulty dangles? Nathan MacKinnon!
You can improve that in the NHL. It’s fine.
In fact, I would argue that it’s better to improve this in the NHL. The CHL is too slow. It won’t teach him this kind of thing. It’ll be easier for him to abuse his speed advantage and forego lateral passing plays in transition.
Oh, Derek. How can you possibly know that?
BECAUSE HE DID IT!
I think I’ve made my point here. Jett Luchanko’s development will not be harmed by playing in the NHL. It will probably be helped. He was made for the pace of pro hockey, and playing in a league where everything happens fast won’t enable him to abuse a breakneck pace to produce in Guelph in ways that he’d never do in the NHL.
He should make the NHL because he was absolutely one of the team’s best 3 centers in camp, and he was way closer to their best center than their 4th center. We make up these weird extra bars for 18 year olds.
“Well, he didn’t score 7 points in 4 games.”
Who cares? Really, who cares? What the hell is training camp for if not determining your best team on opening day?
Right now, the Flyers’ best opening day roster includes Jett Luchanko. And far from that harming his development, I think him playing in the NHL will help it. It will help his development far more than him making unbeneficial changes to his game in order to abuse a feeder league, so he can waste 3 years ironing out flaws in his game that didn’t exist prior to his “big breakout that made him the steal of the 2017 draft”… oh, sorry, that was Morgan Frost.
We’ve done this before. How did overcooking Frost in the CHL work out? It incentivized him to try dangles without speed differentials and play the game as if he was a subpar skater when he’s actually a high-end skater.
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