Flyers Briere 18 Months to Close

The Flyers Joel Farabee-Morgan Frost trade means that Danny Briere’s ’18 Months to Close’ has officially begun

You know what happened. That’s the beauty of waiting a little to publish something like this. I don’t need to tell you that the Flyers traded Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost as if I’m breaking news. You already know that. 

Flyers trade Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost to Calgary:

You already know that the return on both of those players is Andrei Kuzmenko, Jacob Pelletier, a 2nd round pick in 2025, and the future rights to a 14-year-old. Seriously, they traded for a 7th round pick in 2028!

That’s funny. But I don’t actually feel the need to mock Danny today. 

This trade is incredibly interesting.

Not necessarily because of the actual bottom line, but because of what it portends. The air is thick with innuendo today.

Danny has what I dubbed “18 months to close” after the organization raised the prices of their season tickets by a significant margin, and today’s move looks more like the first step of achieving a larger goal. 

That will be easier to demonstrate when you know who the Flyers received in return

Jakob Pelletier is the one who creates less implications. He’s a player I like, but he’s comparatively less interesting. So let’s start with him. 

Pelletier was drafted in 2019 with the 26th overall pick. He was a player who was primarily viewed as a creative and shifty puck carrier who created offense in bunches to compensate for his lack of size. That story has been written before, but it’s featured more tragedies than triumphs. 

The thing that ultimately makes Pelletier interesting is his motor. He’s relentless, a hard forechecker, and someone who is deceptively difficult to knock off of pucks. I think Flyers fans will like him a lot, and I think his bottom-line stats are somewhat misleading. There’s more here than meets the eye. 

The Flames primarily used Pelletier on their fourth line. Besides the lack of ice time, the fourth line for Calgary–and many other teams–exclusively plays a hard-nosed and directly vertical style of game. That has an impact on a player’s ability to make plays laterally and create goal scoring sequences with their passing, a primary skill of this player. 

His goal scoring is right in line with expectations for a fourth liner, actually probably higher, with 4 goals in 20 games. But if this guy is a playmaker, and that’s what he has always been, I’d expect some more assists if you’re willing to feature him in a larger role. 

Now, let’s get to the innuendo laden parts of this deal

It’s Andrei Kuzmenko from which the interesting bits of this deal all emanate. On the surface, he’s not that interesting. There’s some intrigue there for the player, at least as far as I’m concerned. His on-ice impacts on scoring chances have been middle of the road for the entirety of his stay in the NHL, but that’s actually part of the selling point rather than a true issue. 

His hands in tight spaces and his finishing around the net is legendary. It’s gone silent for this season, but we have enough of a sample to suggest that this is more of a temporary low than a true expose of his true nature. 

Everyone talks about his stay in Vancouver featuring an utterly absurd 27 percent shooting rate, which netted him 39 goals and 74 points in a way that people didn’t find to be particularly legitimate. But he followed that up in his second season, after a trade from Vancouver, with 14 goals in 29 games with Calgary and a 24 percent shooting rate. Essentially, this is who he is. A streaky netfront scorer who isn’t particularly adept at bringing the puck to those areas. 

He’s the perfect wingman for Matvei Michkov. Michkov brings exactly what Kuzmenko needs, and Kuzmenko is someone that Michkov actually knows. The two were teammates in 2021 when Michkov was playing for SKA in his draft-1 season. 

And yet, that isn’t the full scope of the intrigue. Have you been catching the drift under the surface of this writing? Kuzmenko’s initial stop was in Vancouver. He’s an ideal wingman for Matvei Michkov, because he was once the ideal wingman for Elias Pettersson. 

The white whale. The thing that could make this plan go from stupid to stupendous in an instant. The 1C that everyone is clamoring for. An elite NHL player who, through a bit of inexplicable fortune, is available on the market. A stroke of luck not seen since Jack Eichel. 

The team who was daring enough to close on Eichel got the Stanley Cup as a reward for their boldness. Will the team daring enough to close on Pettersson reach similar glorious heights? 

The Flyers have given themselves “18 months to close,” and to give their fans a reason to invest more heavily in the team. This is it. This is your reason. 

Now, what’s that all about? Kuzmenko was convinced to waive his no-move clause because Danny and Jonesy told him that they needed him. That there would be a good reason for him to come to Philadelphia. This hardly sounds like a basic cap dump. Michkov was part of the sale, but this is something altogether different. They said this separately from their idea of uniting him with Michkov. 

Perhaps it’s because the Flyers know they have “18 months to close,” and they know he’s great friends with their white whale? 

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