VOORHEES, N.J. — You hear it in the public comments from Daniel Briere and Keith Jones. You see it in the club’s marketing campaign, including the new “Brick by Brick” catchphrase, which is plastered on a banner outside the training facility and will inevitably appear on I-95 billboards and SEPTA buses.
The rebuild, everyone in the Philadelphia Flyers organization is quick to acknowledge, is still ongoing. There are no illusions that this is a team that can break its now half-century Stanley Cup drought. Ending a five-year absence from the playoffs might even be a stretch.
But there’s a different feel to training camp, which began with the first on-ice drills on Thursday, than there has been in each of the first two years of Briere’s tenure as general manager. The players are aware that management expects the 2025-26 team to be meaningfully better than it has been in the recent past. It certainly should be better, they figure, than the club that finished with the fourth-worst record in the league last season, considering the 2025 offseason was much more about addition than subtraction.
Travis Konecny seemed to welcome the challenge.
“Whether it’s named a rebuild or not, I think as players, you naturally want to finish as high as you can. But I think this year, mentally, you look at it like, we’ve kind of spent enough time down here,” he said, motioning low with his right hand.
The biggest change from this time last year is, of course, the coaching staff. There was no yellow rope stretched from one end of the rink to the other while players tirelessly skated laps at the behest of then-coach John Tortorella, as happened the past three years in a test of their endurance.
A few players joked about that.
“A lot less NASCAR laps, that’s for sure,” said Cam York, when asked how this year’s first day felt different.
Said Sean Couturier: “We’re actually getting into some systems, and playing hockey. It’s different than using a rope and skating laps, that’s for sure.”
Echoing his front-office bosses, new coach Rick Tocchet made it clear that there’s plenty of work to be done to grow the Flyers into the perennial playoff team they eventually hope to be. “We’ve got so much work to even think of (the playoffs),” he said.
Something Tocchet has seemingly made a priority is establishing a strong rapport with the captain, Couturier. The 32-year-old center and longest-tenured Philadelphia athlete pointed out more than once that he didn’t have much of a relationship with Tortorella, and on Thursday, he quipped that he’s had more conversations with Tocchet “over the last three months than I had over two years with Torts.”
Indications are that Tocchet, 61, is going to take a much more traditional approach with his captain, who looked like he had extra pep in his step late last season after Tortorella was let go, and who Tocchet had skating as Matvei Michkov’s center on Thursday, an early sign that the coach expects — or at least hopes — Couturier can be a key contributor, after the player enjoyed his first healthy summer in several years.
“There’s been a couple times (Couturier has) come up to me and asked me, ‘Can we do this? Can we do that?’ And that’s the relationship I want to have,” Tocchet said. “I want him to worry about his game. The leadership, it will come. I’ll help him out on that.”
But even if Couturier struggles with his consistency again, as he did under Tortorella, Tocchet will have more options than his predecessor did for the past few years. Not only are there new additions such as Trevor Zegras and Christian Dvorak, but the Flyers have a decent crop of young players that are hoping to break through, including center Jett Luchanko, who missed rookie camp with a nagging groin injury but was a full participant on Thursday. It was notable, too, that Nikita Grebenkin, who showed well at rookie camp, skated on the left wing of Couturier and Michkov, while rookie Alex Bump was the left wing with Zegras at center and Konecny at right wing.
It’s a fool’s errand to deeply dissect any Day 1 line combinations, but it was still a sign of where the organization is headed. Briere mentioned this week that part of the reason he was able to trade players such as Morgan Frost, Joel Farabee and Scott Laughton last season was because they were losing some of their responsibilities to young players. Something that excites him about this year’s camp is that there should be plenty of healthy competition, whether it’s for roster spots or ice time.
“Nobody can be comfortable or happy with what they’ve done in the past,” Briere said on Tuesday. “They’ve got to keep getting better and better — and that includes all our veterans, because our young guys are starting to push, and they’re hungry for more.”
Konecny welcomes that, too.
“Yeah, I hope so, because then it pushes the vets too to stay on top of it,” he said. “The more competitive it gets, it makes everyone better.”
Said Couturier: “I think we’re seeing right now that the depth that we have. With draft picks over the last couple years and guys in the minors coming up, there seems to be a lot of prospects on the rise.”
Whether it all adds up to the Flyers being a better team, or even one that can hang around the playoff race, will be up to them. But the expectations have been set, both publicly and privately.
“You never know what goes on (in a season),” Konecny said, “but for us right now, we’ve raised the bar a little bit.”
(Photo of Bobby Brink and Travis Konecny: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)