If the Philadelphia Flyers are done for the offseason, they'll leave more work for themselves at the start of the 2025-26 season.
The cap space situation isn't looking too hot, even if goalie Ivan Fedotov is re-assigned to the AHL to start the year.
If Tyson Foerster and Rasmus Ristolainen are both unable to begin the year healthy, the Flyers will have to choose their one extra roster player carefully. They won't be able to afford to have more than that.
A potential workaround? Finally biting the bullet and trading Ryan Ellis, or the two years left on his contract.
Flipping the third-round pick you got in the Andrei Kuzmenko deal to move that contract is decent business if you ask me, and it allows you to spend in both the 2026 and 2027 free agent classes, rather than just the 2027 class.
Elsewhere around the NHL through the lens of The Hockey News...
On Tuesday night, the Seattle Kraken re-signed winger Kaapo Kakko to a three-year, $13.575 million ($4.525 million AAV) contract, with the Finn capitalizing on a career year for himself.
Flyers Roster Battles Become Clearer with Porter Martone Taking NCAA Route
Porter Martone's commitment to the NCAA's Michigan State means one less winger is battling for a roster spot with the <a href="https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/philadelphia-flyers">Philadelphia Flyers</a> this fall.
I loved his fit in Seattle, and I think he was better with the New York Rangers than people gave him credit for this season.
Those of you who have been reading my work for a while now know that I've propped Kakko up as a Flyers trade target a few times to, obviously, no avail.
A good player, still young, and finally hitting his stride, it would seem. It would've been nice to see Kakko play for a better team than the Kraken in a role that suits his strengths, but maybe we'll get to see it in a few years. Who knows?
And a note on Ozzy Osbourne, similar to what I did with Johnny Gaudreau last summer:
Obviously such a shame having only recently played his last show, but life tends to work that way sometimes. I think it was clear Ozzy's time was coming sooner rather than later with the years-long struggle with Parkinson's.
I grew up an Ozzy Osbourne fan thanks to my dad, who got me into (or helped get me into) a lot of my hobbies and such, like sports. That's why I'm here writing this, frankly.
Ozzy was one of those connections I had left to my dad, so Wednesday's news of Ozzy's passing hit harder than I probably would have anticipated.
I can vaguely remember watching 'The Osbournes' on TV growing up, and, looking back, I thought it was ironic that my mom had recently been watching reruns of it the last few weeks.
Maybe I'm the only one, but life sometimes shows you patterns leading up to things before they happen, and you look back in retrospect like, 'Yeah, that was predictable.'
The goal, I guess, is noticing things in the present rather than after the fact.
But, in general, these are the musings of a 24-year-old slowly but surely losing big chunks of his childhood with age. I reckon many older readers have gone through the same?