While many of the other teams were engulfed in the free-agent frenzy on Saturday, it was always going to be a quiet event for the Flyers. Aside from any short-term deals, they were not going to be heavily active with most of the roster already known as the height of offseason activity nears its end.
The Flyers did make one move in the first few hours of free agency. They signed forward Ryan Poehling to a one-year deal worth $1.4 million.
Poehling, 24, spent the 2022-23 season with the Penguins, scoring seven goals and 14 points in 53 games.
Poehling was a first-round pick (25th overall) of the Montreal Canadiens in the 2017 NHL Draft. The 6’2”, 196-pound forward spent parts of three seasons with the Canadiens before joining the Penguins last season, scoring 20 goals and 36 points in 138 career games. In his NHL debut on April 6, 2019, he scored a hat trick. In 2020-21, he did not play an NHL game, but scored 11 goals and 25 points in 28 games with the Laval Rocket in the AHL.
Poehling was also part of the US World Junior Championships rosters for three seasons. On the U-18 team in 2017, he scored three goals and five points in seven games. For the gold medal-winning U-20 team in 2018, he scored one goal and had two assists in seven games. For the 2019 U-20 team, which claimed silver, he had five goals and eight points in seven games.
