With the September 15th deadline looming for max-term contracts as well as deals with a higher allowable signing bonus allocation (and less restrictive year-to-year variability rules), some teams will redouble their efforts to sign their pending free agents.\u00a0 It appears that the Flyers are not one of those squads.<\/p>\n
In a recent interview with RG\u2019s Andrew Knoll<\/a>, GM Daniel Briere noted that there are no ongoing talks with their pending free agents.<\/p>\n There are two players of note with expiring contracts next summer.\u00a0 One is winger Matvei Michkov<\/a><\/strong>, who will be exiting his entry-level contract and will be a restricted free agent without salary arbitration eligibility.\u00a0 The other is veteran blueliner Rasmus Ristolainen<\/a><\/strong>, who will be eligible for unrestricted free agency in July.<\/p>\n Earlier this summer, Briere believed that the right course for Michkov might be to wait and see how the upcoming season goes.\u00a0 After a strong 63-point freshman year in 2024-25, the 21-year-old saw his production dip to 20 goals and 31 assists in 81 contests while seeing his ice time drop to just under 15 minutes per night.\u00a0 At first glance, both sides could certainly benefit from waiting to see how this season goes to know what\u2019s the right type of offer to make.<\/p>\n On the other hand, after seeing how sharp the increase in salaries for younger players has been this summer, it felt like Briere could be proactive to see what the expectations for a new deal for Michkov might be.\u00a0 Instead, it looks like they\u2019re sticking with their original plan.<\/p>\n As for Ristolainen, he has been someone that the Flyers have been open to trading for a couple of years now but have placed a very high price tag on his services.\u00a0 In essence, he\u2019s someone that they certainly like but they weren\u2019t going to say no if the right offer came along.<\/p>\n The 31-year-old has battled some injuries in recent years but, when healthy, he can still log more than 20 minutes per game while playing on the right side of the back end, the side in much higher demand.\u00a0 Accordingly, even with the injuries, AFP Analytics projected<\/a> a few months back that Ristolainen could land a little over $6MM per season on a medium-term extension, a nice bump on his current $5.1MM price tag.<\/p>\n Philadelphia has Jamie Drysdale<\/a><\/strong> signed through 2029-30 while youngsters David Jiricek<\/a><\/strong> and Oliver Bonk<\/a><\/strong> have two years left on their respective deals.\u00a0 In that sense, there isn\u2019t necessarily a need to re-sign Ristolainen now if the hope is that those two eventually fill the second and third slots on the right side of the blueline.\u00a0 However, there\u2019s also some value in keeping some quality veteran depth around, especially with some question marks surrounding Jiricek\u2019s development so far.<\/p>\n But for now, Briere is holding off on extension talks for Ristolainen and Michkov.\u00a0 He acknowledged that he expects that there will be discussions at some point but it certainly feels like it\u2019s not a front-burner issue for the team so it may be a while before those actually get underway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the September 15th deadline looming for max-term contracts as well as deals with a higher allowable signing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1036273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[42],"tags":[237916,293,3108,266431,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1036272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-matvei-michkov","tag-nhl","tag-philadelphia-flyers","tag-rasmus-ristolainen","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117193857197372046","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1036273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}