The ink wasn’t even dry on the shiny new five-year contract that the Flyers gave to center Christian Dvorak before the logic of said contract came into question. This is par for the course nearly every time someone signs for big money anywhere, but Dvorak’s deal seems a bit peculiar for a number of reasons.
First, when looking at career performance and aging curve, giving five extra years to a player who is having his best offensive season on the cusp of turning 30 does not seem to make much sense on the surface. True, Dvorak is likely to set career highs across the board this year, but where do things go from there? It seems pretty unreasonable to expect him to top those levels or even maintain them before his numbers dip back down in his early 30’s.
Dvorak’s new contract should call his long-term fit into question
Point production aside, Dvorak brings a responsible defensive game, good faceoff skills, and the coveted “good locker room guy” label, but those can only go so far when you’re a team like the Flyers who lack the kind of high-end gamebreakers that are needed to seriously compete for a Stanley Cup. Perhaps the early extension for Dvorak was rooted in the Flyers’ fear as they looked ahead at the barren 2026 free agent market.
All of the top names have already re-signed with their current clubs, which may have caused Briere and Flyers’ braintrust to pivot from viewing Dvorak as a one-year stopgap to a necessary long-term piece simply because there was nothing readily available that was better. You’ll never get anyone to actually say this, of course, but the pieces seem to fit.
I once again question why the Flyers would re-sign Dvorak or Zegras without first splitting them up and deciding how impactful either is. They haven’t given Zegras a real look at center yet.
— Russ Joy (@JoyOnBroad) January 6, 2026
Dvorak is a good player. FA market stinks. But a NTC and 5 years? What?
Keeping Dvorak around while Sean Couturier and Noah Cates remain locked up for several more years also points to another potential issue — eroding confidence in Jett Luchanko and other prospects in the pipeline. The center depth upcoming in the organization isn’t great, and it’s certainly not as good as it should be right now given that the Flyers have been picking in the top half of the first round for multiple years.
That isn’t all on Briere and this regime, but they likely wouldn’t be jamming up the center position if they thought that actual help was on the way soon. The Flyers can always make a trade later or simply move some centers to the wing if new blood forces its way onto the team, but it’s a valid concern to bring up right now.
As for the money on Dvorak’s deal, $5.15 million per season sounds like a lot but is really not much of an issue. Even with his money accounted for, the Flyers still have over $41 million in cap space for next season according to CapWages. A chunk of that will (hopefully) be spent on Trevor Zegras and some other restricted free agents like Jamie Drysdale, but a rising cap means that Dvorak isn’t really hurting the finances.
Where you do start to worry, however, is the overall length of the contract and the trade/movement protection that it contains. It would have looked a lot better if it were only three years. Instead, the Flyers will be paying Dvorak until he’s 35 unless they can shed him sooner than that, which won’t be easy if he’s underperforming.
Briere has potentially undone some of the excellent work he pulled off when he dumped Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost last year by clogging up a roster spot on a very middling player for too long and for too much money. Ultimately, Dvorak’s presence shouldn’t stand in the way of the Flyers taking a serious run at a star player, but you just wonder how much value he’ll be bringing a few years from now when his spot in the lineup could be used for a younger (and cheaper) player.
It’s clear the organization felt the need to keep the current team intact as they make an honest-to-goodness attempt to make the playoffs this year. Briere already told us the team wouldn’t be sellers this year, and he remains true to his word. Retaining Dvorak helps the team right now, but it may come at a long-term cost, because it is highly unlikely to make a difference in helping the Flyers reach serious contender status during the life of this contract.