Somehow, in the big-picture of this rebuilding hockey team we follow here, it feels like two of the few guys on the roster that are established as good NHL players are getting a bit overlooked.
Sean Couturier, who hasn’t played since December 2021 after multiple back surgeries, is expected to return to the team this year, and with a contract that looks pretty immovable in the short-term there’s some interest in seeing if he can get himself back to something resembling pre-surgery form. Cam Atkinson, meanwhile, acquitted himself nicely to Philadelphia in his first season here before neck problems and an ensuing surgery also cost him the entire 2022-23 season. With two seasons left on his deal, there’s a world in which he becomes a tradeable piece if he can come back strong this season. Couple their on-ice abilities with the potential role the two veterans might play in a young, rebuilding locker room, and there’s some intrigue in the coming season for them, to be sure.
But there’s another reason Couturier and Atkinson turning it around and becoming players the Flyers may be able to trade is so important. They may not know it, and in fact, it is completely irrelevant to the long-term health of this franchise. But it’s also extremely cool, and I, personally, need it to keep going.
Every year, the NHL gives teams seven draft picks. A team can use those draft picks to draft players that will play for their team, or it can trade them for players that play for their team, or it can trade them for other draft picks that they can use to pick or trade for players. Meanwhile, the league also gives teams the ability to use money to pay those players, and other players. (The money teams can pay used to be unlimited; it, of course, is now limited to around $82.5 million per year plus whatever is being paid to players on NHL deals in the minor leagues.)
Every player acquisition a team makes can be tied back to those things – money, or their own draft picks. And any player a team gets that isn’t a free agent acquisition or a selection of one of their own draft picks can have its lineage traced back to those things.
Eventually, that will bring us back to Couturier and Atkinson. But it starts with a Flyers-owned draft pick. The very first one in franchise history, in fact. (Full disclosure, the first several links in this chain were formed before I was alive, so forgive me if I miss out on any details here.)
On June 7, 1967, the day after the Flyers formed their inaugural team in the original expansion draft, they made their first-ever picks in the amateur draft. Their first pick, and the fifth overall selection in that draft, was winger Serge Bernier from the QJAHL (or something like that; hammering down details of Canadian junior leagues prior to the forming of the CHL in 1975 is tricky). Bernier would have a nice career as a hockey player, but his greatest successes came away from Philadelphia (mostly in the relatively-short-lived WHA).
In the middle of his second full season in the NHL, in January 1972, Bernier was traded in what was, at the time, the biggest trade in NHL history. Bernier was sent, along with three other guys who I’m sure are wonderful but are not super-relevant to the story at hand, to the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for Bill Flett, Eddie Joyal, Jean Potvin, and Ross Lonsberry.
Most of those names fizzle out on our trade tree here pretty quickly. Joyal was lost to the Oilers in the initial WHA draft in 1972. Flett was on the first Cup team in 1974, but was traded shortly after to Toronto for two guys the team lost down the line. Potvin was traded for Terry Crisp, who was on both Cup teams and then retired to a long career as a coach (including with the Flyers) and then as a broadcaster.
The focus here is on Lonsberry, who spent that partial season and six more full ones in Philadelphia, winning two Cups as a key member of the Bullies. That run ended for him in the summer of 1978, when he was traded along with two other two-time champions in Orest Kindrachuk and Tom Bladon to … the Penguins. Perish the thought. The payout, though, helped keep our train moving: in exchange for those three players, the Flyers got the sixth overall pick in the 1978 draft, which they used to select defenseman Behn Wilson.
Wilson would spend five seasons with the Flyers, with the high-point of that run coming in a strong 1980-81 season that he’d have trouble matching in the two years that followed. At that point – in the summer of 1983 – he’d get traded to Chicago for Doug Crossman and a second-round pick that would become Scott Mellanby.
While Mellanby himself has a fun trade tree from there – he was part of a six-player deal in 1991 that, if we follow it far enough, spills into The Eric Lindros Trade – we’re focused for now on Crossman, a consistent lineup mainstay for the Flyers for the five years that followed that trade. From there, Crossman was traded in a one-for-one deal for another defenseman, Jay Wells. Wells then spent a season and part of a second one with the Flyers, before getting dealt to Buffalo in a trade for Kevin Maguire and a second-round pick in the upcoming 1990 draft.
If you’re a reader of this site and you recognize a lot of the names above, power to you. Here is about the point that some of these names may be more familiar if you’ve been around long enough. Because that pick the Flyers got for the 1990 draft ended up turning into a Swedish winger from Luleå named Mikael Renberg.
Renberg, of course, is most well-known among Flyers fans for his spot riding shotgun with Lindros and John LeClair as part of the Legion of Doom line for the majority of his four seasons with the team. After things fell apart in the ’97 Cup Finals, the Flyers took a big swing, signing Chris Gratton to an offer sheet from the Tampa Bay Lightning that went unmatched.
The Flyers, not trying to spend four straight years without their own first-round picks (which was the necessary compensation for signing Gratton to the deal that they did (side note: remember offer sheets?)), worked a deal with those very same Lightning to give up players and get back those draft picks. And Renberg was the big name among the players they gave up. (The other was Karl Dykhuis.)
Essentially, if we’re willing to switch around the order of operations a bit here: The Flyers traded Renberg (and Dykhuis) for Gratton. That’s where the story continues, because the whole Chris Gratton thing didn’t really work out for anyone involved and a year and a half later the Flyers and Lightning basically got back together and were like “lol what if we just undid that trade,” sort of. And with that, Gratton was sent back to Tampa, and Renberg came back to Philadelphia.
But Renberg’s not the one who keeps the chain together here. That would be the other guy the Flyers got back for Gratton, forward Daymond Langkow. A fifth overall pick by Tampa in 1995, Langkow hadn’t quite put it together in the way Tampa was hoping for, but he managed to string together a pair of pretty solid seasons with the Flyers from 1999 to 2001. That was about it for his time in Philadelphia, however, as Langkow was dealt to Phoenix (they were Phoenix at the time) for the seemingly-high price of a 2002 second-round pick and a 2003 first-round pick.
Langkow, to his credit, took another step forward in Phoenix and put together a nice career for himself with over 1000 games. But the trade was certainly one that worked out well for the Flyers, and for us as observers of this now-in-its-fifth-decade trade tree. The second-rounder in 2002 has its own fun side story, as it helped the Flyers get the pick that became Joni Pitkanen, who eventually helped get the Flyers Joffrey Lupul, who was then dealt for Chris Pronger. But, not the topic at hand. The other pick in that trade turned into the 11th pick in the loaded 2003 draft.
That pick was used on none other than Jeff Carter of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds.
From here, the path is pretty straightforward. Carter, of course, had a number of excellent years with the Flyers, playing the kind of sniper role that the team has frankly been trying to fill since it lost him while also being a highly underrated two-way player. But, he didn’t lift the puck in Game 6 and apparently he didn’t go to Dry Island or whatever. Win some, lose some.
Anyways, the Flyers dealt Carter to Columbus (much to his personal chagrin) for two draft picks and Jakub Voracek. The next day, they used the first of those two draft picks on Sean Couturier. A decade later, they traded Voracek back to Columbus in a one-for-one deal for Cam Atkinson.
Both of them are here at least in part due to the Flyers’ first draft pick in team history, and it is very crucial one or both of them is dealt for something meaningful that will be with the team for a long time and keep this chain going.
Basically, the Flyers’ first-ever draft pick was used to pick a guy, who got traded for another guy, who got traded for a draft pick, which was used to pick another guy, who they traded for another guy, who they traded for another guy, who they traded for a draft pick, which they used to pick another guy, who was sent as offer sheet compensation for another guy, who they then traded for another guy, who they traded for another draft pick, which was used to pick another guy, who they traded for a) a guy that they then traded for another guy who’s still here and b) a draft pick that was used to pick a guy who’s also still here.
And … now we’re caught up. Any questions?
