Briere talks Laughton trade, how excited he is for Nikita Grebenkin
Philadelphia Flyers general manager Danny Briere had a busy last Friday. Making three deals in total to ship out three roster players for purely future assets and trim this current Flyers team in pursuit of a more successful rebuild.
Easily the most significant of the trio of trades was sending longtime forward Scott Laughton to the Toronto Maple Leafs for a 2027 first-round pick and 21-year-old prospect Nikita Grebenkin. It was a organization-shifting deal that let one of the most senior members of the team — and most meaningful to the majority of the fan base — go play some meaningful games for his hometown team.
Briere appeared on Monday’s episode of “Leafs Morning Take” at The Leafs Nation to discuss how the trade came to be and other details about the move. One of the first major points was a discussion around when the Flyers knew to start looking at selling at the trade deadline instead of staying course.
“At some point, we have to start looking the other way,” Briere said. “We want to start adding and be no the other side. We didn’t feel that this was the time, yet, this trade deadline. I think at the time we were five points out of the playoffs but we had to leapfrog six teams and that’s what makes it tough. You need five, six teams to kind of go south. And that’s probably not going to happen. Realistically, it was just tough for us to get in the playoffs. And we still hope; I still hope our team puts in a string of wins and puts us back in the playoff hunt, but we have to try to be realistic.”
Honestly, it feels like a breath of fresh air to hear an executive talk in realistic terms. Your standard general manager that wants to keep his cards close to his chest would just see the point different and try to push through. Briere saw the exact scenario and pulled the parachute and made timely moves and took advantage of the lack of true sellers at the deadline.
But it wasn’t just the top teams going after a player like Laughton. Thanks to how much the 30-year-old brings in all aspects on and off the ice, some rebuilding teams wanted to get a piece of that culture building.
“Surprisingly, it was not just the contenders that were calling for Scott,” Briere said. “A couple teams that are actually rebuilding, were really interested in his leadership. We used it the last couple of years to help our rebuild, to help our culture, to bring back what the Flyers were in the past. A couple teams saw that and that’s why they called on him too, because they are rebuilding and had showed an interest in Scotty. It wasn’t just contenders that were looking to add Scott Laughton.”
Briere didn’t divulge any more information about who those teams were, but we can probably guess a couple non-playoff teams that want to turn the corner quickly — possibly the Buffalo Sabres trying to fix their whole deal with one player, or the Chicago Blackhawks not making Connor Bedard hate playing hockey — but it would only be a complete guess.
The Flyers did get their ask of a first-round pick back for Laughton, but also a very intriguing prospect in Nikita Grebenkin. And Briere admitted to not be familiar with the player but the scouts around him were banging the table for the Flyers to get the young winger back in any deal from the Leafs.
“I didn’t know much about him. I had seen him play a few shifts here and there. I liked what I saw but I don’t know much about his game as far as the overall game that he brings. As soon as we started talking to Toronto, one of the names that our pro scouts were salivating over was Nikita Grebenkin. So, we discussed all kinds of scenarios and for us, it was important that Nikita was part of that package to close out the deal,” Briere said.
“I keep hearing good things about him and our scouts are really excited. I can’t wait to go watch him play. We’re going through all the visa stuff right now to get him in the US. We hope he’s there by the weekend. He’s going to start in Lehigh Valley for us but we hope we can give him a few games before the end of the year with the Flyers as well.”
We love to see the Flyers scouts get who they want and get some clarification about Grebenkin’s immediate future.
As expected, Grebenkin is currently experiencing some visa issues and was not able to play for the Phantoms on their road trip this past weekend. But, the hopes are that Grebenkin will be making his Flyers organizational debut this upcoming weekend in the AHL and the Flyers are hoping to be able to see him play some NHL games before the end of the season.
The Flyers have already used three of their allotted four post-trade deadline recalls from the AHL for Emil Andrae, Rodrigo Abols, and Olle Lycksell. So it sure sounds like they are planning on using that final recall on Grebenkin if he looks good enough through the next couple of weeks. Now, the Flyers would be able to bring up anyone from the AHL on an emergency basis if they don’t have 12 forwards, six defensemen, or two goaltenders, but we don’t think they’re planning to have any absences from the roster through the final 17 games.
There may just be reasons to watch the final several Flyers games of the season other than Matvei Michkov, after all.
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