Game Five of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final is on Saturday night in Edmonton. The Calder Cup Final opened on Friday with the Abbotsford Canucks beating the Charlotte Checkers, 4-3, in double overtime. Meanwhile, here are your Flyers Quick Hits for June 14, 2025. We’ll profile 2025 Draft candidate Jake O’Brien, take a look at which Flyers Alumni will take part in the Charity Classic Weekend, and close out with the latest edition of Jason Myrtetus’s Flyers Daily.
O’Brien’s puck skills drive his Flyers’ Draft candidacy
Brantford Bulldogs center Jake O’Brien is widely regarded as a potential top-10 prospect for the 2025 NHL Entry Draft. However, he’s not often ranked within the top five. If the pundit predictions are accurate to how the actual Draft plays out, O’Brien falls within the range where the Flyers may tab him with the sixth overall pick of the Draft. There’s a batch of centers and center/wing candidates in that range.
There are many wildcards in this year’s Draft. Could San Jose trade the second overall pick? Will a team in the top five go off the board (at least compared to public rankings) in similar fashion to Anaheim taking Beckett Sennecke third overall last year? How much will the recently much-hyped Brady Martin shake up the top 10? Will two defensemen (rather than just one) come off the board in the top eight?
More and more, it seems that Caleb Desnoyers will be off the board by the time the Flyers’ first selection comes up in Round One. Along with offensive dynamo Michael Misa, the well-rounded Desnoyers seems unlikely to remain available through five picks. Among the other most often-mentioned centers and center/wing swingmen — Anton Frondell, James Hagens, Martin, O’Brien, Roger McQueen — opinions and comparitive rankings differ from source to source.
O’Brien is a pure playmaking center and dynamic stickhandler. These are his clear-cut strengths. He’s a finesse center who can make clever and creative or subtle little plays in small areas as well as anyone in his Draft class. When he gets to the pro level, guaranteed, some will want him to shoot the puck more and focus less on being a distributor. But he’ll always likely be much more of a setup guy than a shooter. Don’t like such players? Then don’t draft him and wish he was some other type of forward.
The Toronto native is tall (6-foot-2) but rail thin at age 17. He’ll turn 18 on June 16. O’Brien will need a few years to be physically ready to compete at the NHL level. Although primarily a finesse player, he competes physically as needed in order to not get pushed around. Eventually, he hopes to play pro at about 195 pounds. He has to add about 20 to 25 pounds of muscle to get there.
O’Brien sometimes goes through what I call “the playmakers’ flight”. He’ll have some dry spells points wise when he’s creating but no one seems to finish. It happened early in the 2024-25 before the puck luck evened out. O’Brien is a very good power play setup forward. Fifty of his 98 points this season came on the power play.
The Brampton center was expected to play a key role for Team Canada at the IIHF Under-18 World Championship. However, O’Brien withdrew due an injury sustained during the Ontario Hockey League playoffs. Correspondingly, Soo Greyhounds forward Martin saw an increased role and helped lead Team Canada to the gold medal.
O’Brien is not related to Jay O’Brien, the injury-prone Flyers 2018 first-round pick who did not reach the pro level. It’d be foolish for the Flyers to bypass Caleb Desnoyers solely because his older brother stagnated with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms or because Ian Laperriere is a lifelong family friend. Meanwhile, it’d be downright ludicrous to avoid Jake O’Brien because his unrelated namesake gives one “a bad vibe”.
Charity Classic features dozens of Flyers Alumni
Three days. Three different events (pickleball tournament, walk/run/bicycle, golf tournament). Three different locales (Malvern, Conshohocken). Fifty-plus Flyers Alumni participating. One common goal: raise money for charity and community programs of the Flyers Alumni Association. That’s the 2025 Flyers Alumni Charity Classic weekend (June 21-23) in a nutshell.
Below is the current list of attending Alumni for each event. To register, visit FlyersAlumni.net and click on the event(s) of interest from the top menu bar. From the event page, click the associated registration link.
Flyers Daily: Nick Seeler, viewer mail
Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler is Jason Myrtetus’s guest on the latest edition of the Flyers Daily podcast. Jason also answers podcast listener questions about the Draft, the team’s direction, how aggressive to be this off-season and more. Watch the 30-minute episode below.
Tocchet on Flyers power play, Draft, Michkov
Flyers head coach Rick Tocchet was a special guest on “Kincade and Salciunas” (97.5 The Fanatic) this week. Among other topics, he discussed his thoughts on improving the long-struggling power play, his plan for coaching Matvei Michkov, the upcoming NHL Draft Party in Atlantic City and more.
