We’re only just entering the first full week of this Olympic break, but already it feels as though things have been slowed down to a crawl in the hockey world for ages. It’s high time for us to find something to sustain us through these sure to be quiet next few weeks, and there’s no better time than now to get into our favorite biannual series. It’s Top 25 Under 25 season again!

The concept of the series is simple — your very favorite contributors from the website here all make our personal rankings of the best players under the age of 25 in the organization, based on whatever criteria makes the most sense to us individually, and then those lists are averaged out to come up with our final ranking for the collective. If you weren’t with us over the summer, or just need a bit of a refresher, here’s how the pieces fell in our last ranking.

The midseason ranking is a particularly fun one, as unlike the big ranking over the summer, when we spend a lot of time digging into the players, what they do well and how they fit into the organization and its timeline for contention, this time around we spend a bit more time talking with each other about the players and our rankings of them. It’s a nice change of pace, if we do say so ourselves, but before we dive too deeply into that, let’s get into the ballot a little bit more.

That ranking that we compile over the summer in the aftermath of the draft and the busy part of trade season is usually the one where we see the most change in the ballot, but we do have some key arrivals and departures to highlight before we get too deep into this.

The Departures

As far as graduates from the list go for purely age related reasons, we only had one this time around. Cam York turned 25 back on January 5, so he just missed the cut of eligibility for one more ranking, but that’s just how it goes. He went out on a high note though, certainly, as he cracked last summer’s list at the fifth spot, which was certainly respectable indeed.

Of course, York isn’t the only player we saw leave the ballot. The Flyers had a few prospects who have been moved out of the organization entirely over these last six months, as they’ve worked to take a more proactive approach to their prospect management, moving on from players who are log jammed and don’t seem to have an easy path to contention for an NHL job. With this in mind, each of J.R. Avon, Samu Tuomaala, and Ethan Samson were sent out in trades over the last few months to be given a change of scenery, to see if more of their games can be unlocked elsewhere.

The Additions

And while the scale is not the same as after a draft, we do still have a handful of new players to welcome into the mix for this iteration of the ranking. As a result of those trades that we mentioned above (and a couple that we haven’t yet), the Flyers added a handful more interesting young players into their mix, all of whom are in the mix down in the Phantoms’ lineup. The trade for Avon brought in forward Tucker Robertson, and the swap for Tuomaala brought defenseman Christian Kyrou, both of whom have been settling really nicely into meaningful roles with the AHL squad. Along with that, it was a swap of defensemen which sent Samson out and saw Roman Schmidt as the return, and while he’s struggled at times and hasn’t been able to hold on to the same volume of minutes that Samson did, he’s certainly delivered on the physical presence that the organization seemed to be looking to add.

On top of that, the Flyers made a couple more trades early in the season which sent out older organizational pieces (more or less) and brought back in some younger players. The first week of the season saw them send Ryan Ellis’s contract and a conditional pick to San Jose for Carl Grundstrom as the main return, but defenseman Artem Guryev (who’s bounced back and forth between Reading and Lehigh Valley so far this season) was also part of the return. Additionally, the Flyers made a move to send Dennis Gilbert to the Senators, who needed a bit more veteran stability on the back end, and in exchange the Flyers were able to give Max Guenette a change of scenery, as he was toiling away in contract holdout limbo, and he’s settled in nicely with his new team quite quickly.

When all of that shuffling has been said and done, this is what our complete pool of under-25 players in the organization is looking like:

Artem GuryevBobby BrinkMax WestergardCarter AmicoCole KnubleNathan QuinnChristian KyrouDenver BarkeyNikita GrebenkinEmil AndraeDevin KaplanNoah PowellHelge GransHeikki RuohonenOwen McLaughlinHunter McDonaldIlya PautovPorter MartoneJamie DrysdaleJack BerglundRyan MacPheresonLuke VlooswykJack MurtaghSanteri SulkuMaxence GuenetteJack NesbittShane VansaghiOliver BonkJacob GaucherTrevor ZegrasRoman SchmidtJett LuchankoTucker RobertsonSpencer GillKarsen DorwartTyson FoersterTy MurchisonMassimo RizzoAleksei KolosovAlex BumpMatthew GardCarson BjarnasonAlex CiernikMatvei MichkovYegor ZavraginAlexis Gendron

Now, the contributors here have made our rankings, and the complete sentient blog collective ranking has been compiled, and all that’s left is to work our way through it, which we’ll begin over these next couple of days.

And let us know as we go how it’s looking! If you’re playing along at home, how is our list lining up with yours? Let’s have a bit of fun during these doldrums of the mid-season.