With the Philadelphia Flyers perhaps finally starting to turn the corner with their on-ice results, any and all success can be traced back to the moves made by general manager Danny Briere during his two-plus years in the big chair.
And more so than any other transaction that Briere has made so far, his deal to send Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee to Calgary last season stands out as a great example of the kind of decision that needs to be made for a team to ultimately snap out of a losing culture and build something meaningful.
Danny Briere cleared out two disappointing remnants of the Ron Hextall regime in one fell swoop
Danny Briere's decision to move on from two of the more entrenched players on the team looks even better during the early going this season, thanks to Frost and Farabee both continuing to struggle in Calgary. But let's first look back at the decision itself and how it turned nothing into something.
After some early promise, Farabee seemed absolutely lost for large stretches, putting up just 25 points in 81 games in 2024-25 and sitting at 19 points in 50 games at the time of the trade last season. Frost, meanwhile, occasionally looked like the best player on a bad team, which isn't saying much. He was settling in as a 40-45 point player every year and was due for a raise in the summer of 2025 as a restricted free agent.
Then, an amazing thing happened. Instead of settling for the status quo and being too afraid to shake up the locker room, Briere found a willing trade partner in Calgary who would take on both players in the hopes of elevating their team in its playoff chase. The Flames, in turn, parted with a distressed asset in Andrew Kuzmenko, a youngster having trouble finding regular ice time in Jakob Pelletier, along with draft picks.
In the immediate aftermath of the trade, the Flyers were probably a little worse, although the pieces they got back were intriguing. And Kuzmenko's play ultimately did showcase him enough that the Flyers were able to package him with a 7th round pick to LA in exchange for a 3rd rounder in 2027. Once again, a neat and tidy piece of business from Danny Briere.
So, where does that leave us? Well, neither Kuzmenko nor Pelletier is with the Flyers, but that doesn't really matter in this case. What really counts is the fact that Briere was able to get multiple future draft picks in the deal while also extricating himself from Farabee's $5 million per year cap hit through 2028, as well as having to offer Frost a new deal this past summer.
Frost ultimately signed a 2-year pact with Calgary for $4.38 million per season, meaning that Briere was able to reallocate over $9 million for each of the next two years by clearing out two pieces of dead wood that came woefully short of developing as hoped from the time that Ron Hextall drafted them until early 2025.
This wouldn't all seem so rosy if Frost and Farabee were thriving in their new home north of the border, but, at last check, they were not. Frost put up 3 goals and 9 assists in 32 games after arriving in Calgary last season, while Farabee had just 3 goals and 3 assists in 31 games. And yes, it can be hard for new arrivals to succeed when thrust into a new environment and a new system, so we probably needed to see what they look like for the Flames after they had been through a whole training camp and were further incorporated into the locker room. That's why, looking at how things have played out so far this year, Danny Briere is looking smarter by the game.
For starters, the Flames are a miserable 1-6-0 this season. As you would expect, they're not scoring very much as a team, and Frost/Farabee are no exception. Frost has one goal and one assist so far, while Farabee has just two assists. Is it wrong for Flyers fans to be spiteful and laugh at the lackluster performance of their former players? Probably, but it's nice when the tables are turned once in a while. There is a case to be made that both players' underlying metrics indicate that they are actually performing better than their numbers might show, but let's look at it through another lens.
Farabee has over 400 NHL games under his belt, and Morgan Frost has over 300. They are 25 and 26 years old, respectively. They are right in the wheelhouse of what should be their prime as NHL players, and any breakout from this point on should probably qualify them for "late bloomer" status, which doesn't happen all too often. Yes, they are both NHL-caliber players ultimately, and they'll get paid as such, but Briere crucially recognized two players who weren't moving the needle, and he offloaded them to become someone else's problem.
The Flyers organization did Frost and Farabee a disservice for much of their tenures, and they didn't have much help around them for most of that time. They were miscast in Philadelphia, and Calgary may be doing the same thing, but they could probably both be valuable depth pieces on a true contending club at some point. We can wish them success later in their careers while also appreciating that the current struggles for them and their team are a clear sign that the Flyers won this trade and Briere was savvy to move on when he did.
Whether or not Briere can ever fully weaponize the cap space that he saved by trading Frost and Farabee remains to be seen, since there is a real trend for every single worthwhile pending free agent to simply re-sign with their current club. But he has at the very least cleared a ton of space on the books so that the Flyers can keep their own valuable players and also maybe take a big swing or two in a trade one of these years. Maybe even this deadline, to take an optimistic approach to things.