For the Philadelphia Flyers, goalie has become the organization’s most polarizing position and especially so during this offseason. Incumbent starter Carter Hart has been a complete enigma and has no contract extension in place for his pending restricted free agency in 2024, and the Ivan Fedotov saga went absolutely nowhere, to nobody’s surprise. Further muddying things is the fact that the Flyers went out and drafted Carson Bjarnason and Yegor Zavragin in the top-100 of the 2023 NHL Draft.
Outside of Hart, the Flyers already had young goalies Felix Sandstrom and Sam Ersson among their professional ranks. The former flattered to deceive all year long, while the latter appears poised to take on a full-time NHL role following his two-year, $2.9 million contract extension. The team also signed Belarusian goalie prospect Alexei Kolosov to his entry-level contract and acquired former Los Angeles Kings goalie Cal Petersen as a cap dump in the Ivan Provorov trade.
This begs the question: what are the Flyers actually going to do with all these goalies? In any case, Hart would have the most trade value, notwithstanding any discipline that may or may not be imposed based on the results of the Hockey Canada sexual assault investigation. At this point, it is a foregone conclusion that he’ll be on the Flyers’ roster in some capacity to start 2023.
Sandstrom and Petersen both struggled immensely and should be candidates to start their years in the AHL with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, and Petersen especially so due to his large salary. At the NHL level, this would leave just Hart and Ersson. The proposed solution? Have Petersen, Hart, and Ersson rotate in the Flyers’ net.
The young Ersson impressed in his limited sample size last year, but he didn’t blow the doors off of the Wells Fargo Center either. Hart has struggled a lot with injuries, and particularly late in the season, so ideally the Flyers will want someone with NHL experience to keep them in a comfortable position. Hart is also coming off of a career-high 55 starts and the results were mostly good, so the Flyers will want to maintain that. For the 28-year-old Petersen, this is a last-ditch opportunity to save his NHL career after rapidly declining performances and only a short-term contract keeping him in the league.
A three-headed rotation is very rare in the NHL, but it might make sense for the Flyers in this case. They have an inexperienced young goalie, they have no idea (or do they?) what will happen with Hart, and they have a reclamation project with Petersen. The best-case scenario is that the team rotates the three and see which two rise above, and go from there.