By Kevin Durso, Sports Talk Philly editor 
You could argue that the entire Flyers offseason can be summed up in two words. Nolan Patrick.
The Flyers made plenty of moves, mostly internal, during the offseason, but the move that has emerged as the defining moment has been the leap up in the lottery and the selection of Nolan Patrick.
The last time the Flyers picked in the Top 2 was in 2007 when they selected James van Riemsdyk. The second overall pick in the 2007 NHL Draft didn’t play in the NHL for the next two seasons before making the roster in the 2009-10 season.
The rookie played in 78 games, scoring 15 goals and adding 20 assists for 35 points. That was certainly a modest debut season for van Riemsdyk, but for a Top-2 pick, the expectation is always greater.
In Patrick’s case, the expectation among the fan base is going to be enormous. The kid who was projected to be the No. 1 pick all season suddenly slipped into a neck-and-neck battle as the draft approached and when the No. 1 pick was announced, it was someone else: Nico Hischier.
So Patrick fell to the Flyers and that may prove to be their gain. He passed the test to make the roster in the preseason, despite having surgery to repair a sports hernia just days before the draft. So with Patrick on the team as a 19-year-old, what are reasonable expectations for him?
Role
There’s no way the Flyers try to mess with Patrick to get him into an elevated role. Claude Giroux and Sean Couturier are going to hold higher roles as centers on the team, though it is looking more like Giroux starts the season on the wing. Either way, the highest Patrick would see on any line chart is centering the second line. A middle-six role to start is certainly a fair projection.
As a middle-six player, Patrick gets to start off facing team’s second or third-pairing defensemen, which should help him produce at the NHL level. In addition, not playing on the top line should help keep his minutes at a manageable place to start his career.
Patrick has spent pretty much the entire preseason playing on a line with Jordan Weal and Wayne Simmonds, very suitable partners for the rookie. That appears to be the Flyers second line entering the season.
In addition, Patrick should see some power play time in some capacity. He spent most of the preseason on the second unit, but recently got some time with the top unit as well. With new players expected to come into the fold and Kris Knoblauch joining the Flyers and running the power play, opportunity should be there for Patrick to be productive on special teams, especially if it ends up being on the top unit.
Point Production
Total points is hardly the way to measure how well a player is performing anymore, but it’s an easy and frankly useful way to determine how much success a player is having. For some people, goals, assists and points are all that matters.
With Patrick being a No. 2 overall pick, expectations are going to be high, especially since when fully healthy, he displayed a skill and efficiency that produced 102 points in 72 games with the Brandon Wheat Kings.
So what’s a reasonable expectation for total points? In The Hockey News’ fantasy guide, the projection given to Nolan Patrick is 78 games played with 18 goals and 34 assists for 52 points. If Patrick was on the 2016-17 Flyers, 52 points would have ranked him fifth on the team, behind only Wayne Simmonds (54), Brayden Schenn (55), Claude Giroux (58) and Jake Voracek (61).
For a lot of the Flyers, there’s really no way to go but up. Simmonds is consistently the team’s leading goal-scorer, but doesn’t pick up nearly as much in the assists column. For players like Giroux and Voracek, the points are much more evenly distributed. The same figures for Patrick, who throughout his junior career consistently put up more assists than goals.
As a rookie, shooting for a 15-goal season is a reasonable goal. Anything north of that, including the 18 goals projected by The Hockey News, is icing on the cake. As for total points, if Patrick can already crack the Flyers Top 5, or even Top 4 given Schenn’s departure, it’s a huge accomplishment. If 15 goals is a good benchmark for putting the puck in the net, looking for 45 points — with 30 assists to double the goal total — seems to be reasonable. As with goals, anything higher than 45 and approaching the 52 points The Hockey News projected is a plus.
Performance
Bigger than total points is how Patrick would perform. As a 19-year-old and a highly-touted draft pick, Patrick will be watched under a microscope. And while early on the focus will go toward the positives and praising those despite the usual rookie mistakes that will come, as the season progresses, consistency needs to be the goal for Patrick.
It’s easy to look at the contrasting elements between Shayne Gostisbehere’s rookie season in 2015-16 and Ivan Provorov’s in 2016-17 as markers. Gostisbehere lit up the scoresheet, set an NHL rookie record for points in consecutive games and was a Calder Trophy finalist. But his sophomore season saw the points production drift, and while he was still a fan favorite, his performance still left something to be desired at times. The consistency, especially in his own zone, wasn’t there.
In Provorov’s case, rookie mistakes were evident early on, but turned fairly quickly into consistently solid play defensively with some offensive upside. Provorov wasn’t overly flashy on offense and didn’t factor into scoring near as much as Gostisbehere did as a rookie. But he was consistent defensively, played a heavy workload and started to emerge as a top-pairing defenseman as a rookie before our very eyes.
For Patrick, that’s going to be what sets him apart. It’s not all in the goal scoring or point production. It’s how he carries himself, how he plays in all zones and situations and how consistently he can do it over the course of a month, two months and eventually the entire season.
