Breaking down Karsen Dorwart’s NHL debut with the Flyers

1 week ago  /  Broad Street Hockey  /  Read Time: 2 minutes 30 seconds

The Philadelphia Flyers season is almost done and there has been an unexpected number of things to peak our interest as this terrible campaign closes. Of course, the team fired John Tortorella and we had and are having the last several games without him behind the bench to look deeper into. Then there are some players coming up because of that firing like Jakob Pelletier’s increased role and Matvei Michkov being unleashed onto every opponent.



But there is one thing that will always be interesting no matter what: Seeing a new face in the Orange and Black. The Flyers signed center Karsen Dorwart as a college free agent out of Michigan State and after the 22-year-old spent a solid week or so acclimatizing himself to the league after his collegiate career ended, he made his NHL debut. And other than in front of a home crowd, there might not be any more ideal scenario to make your professional hockey debut, and to get your blood pumping, than at the Bell Centre in Montreal.



Dorwart had a fairly tame stat line. No points earned, two shots on goal three shot attempts, 2-for-5 from the faceoff dot; all within the 10 minutes and 32 seconds he spent out there on the ice. Diving deeper, when he was on the ice at 5-on-5, the Flyers narrowly lost the shot attempt battle 6-7, were outshot 3-5, but no goals happened either so you can’t really complain.



Before the game, according to Dorwart, the Flyers coaching staff were not trying to “overload” him with information and told the debutant to just play his game.



But you can’t really get a sense of a player’s game just by some numbers. We sat down in the video room to break down every single on of his shifts and dive deep into what he did significantly well, where he was inactive, and what he could improve on. Watch it all now on the Broad Street Hockey YouTube channel:









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As said in the video, there were a couple major takeaways. Through Dorwart’s first couple of shifts, he immediately showed just why the Flyers were interested in him for so long and ultimately signed him to his first NHL contract.



He was tenacious on the puck in his first ever NHL shift, with a relentless pursuit to regain possession. Even on his second shift while on the power play, he made a speedy backcheck to prevent the Montreal rusher to get a shot off and have to pass it back to a teammate. Overall, his defense was put through a lot of work and there were a couple of bumps in the preventative play, but his ability to read opponents and predict their movements fairly well was a good sign.



Offensively, there were a couple moments. Of course, in just over 10 minutes and mainly playing on the fourth line, it would be limited, but he was able to get a couple scoring chances off from his stick and make smart decisions with the puck to not just throw away possession. There was one key moment where his teammates could have supported him more with their awareness in the offensive zone and get to the right positions considering all the work he did, so be on the look out for that.



Dorwart wasn’t expected to light the hockey world on fire, but honestly, it’s hard to not come away from watching his debut and want to see more and maybe with more skill on his wings. We’ll see where he goes from here and through the last few Flyers games of the season....

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