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Top-five picks are often referred to as “franchise-changing,” and for good reason. But in the lead-up to a draft, the “change” connotation is almost always viewed positively — a ray of hope for a fan base that likely just suffered through a severely disappointing season.

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Sometimes, however, a top-five pick can be “franchise-changing” in a bad way, in that it ultimately is remembered as a wasted opportunity, an event that could have solved a team’s glaring issues but instead set the organization back years due to its immense failure.

Philadelphia Flyers fans understand this well. In fact, they only have to go back five years to recall this exact feeling.

Had former Flyers general manager Ron Hextall gotten the No. 2 pick correct in 2017 rather than selecting Nolan Patrick, there’s no guarantee his tenure would have ended any differently. After all, both Miro Heiskanen (selected third) and Elias Pettersson (fifth) didn’t crack their teams’ respective NHL rosters until the start of the 2018-19 season — just two months before Hextall would ultimately lose his job — and Cale Makar (taken fourth, and the player who most fans in retrospect would have wanted the Flyers to grab) didn’t become a full-time NHLer until 2019-20. But it’s undeniable that had Fletcher taken one of those three players, his tenure in Philadelphia would almost certainly have been viewed differently.

Right now, the Flyers very clearly lack high-end talent in the NHL, beyond arguably Sean Couturier, who is something of a unique elite player in that he produces high-end results without exhibiting eye-test on-ice dominance. The jump from No. 13 to No. 2 in the draft lottery in 2017 was supposed to be the Flyers’ long-awaited lucky break, an opportunity to acquire that top-of-the-lineup youngster without actually having to fully bottom out from a standings perspective.

Instead, Patrick thus far has been an NHL bust. He finished with 70 points in 197 games with the Flyers, before getting shipped out in the trade for Ryan Ellis. In 2021-22, he appeared in 25 games for the Vegas Golden Knights due to injury and had seven points. How much of a disappointment has Patrick’s NHL career been, relative to others taken at his draft slot? In the 10 years prior to 2017, No. 2 picks averaged 8.64 Goals Above Replacement worth of value per season. Patrick, since making the NHL in 2017-18, has produced just 0.5 GAR per year (including the 2019-20 season which he lost to a migraine/head issue).

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There’s still time for Patrick to turn around his NHL career. But even if it does happen, that won’t help the Flyers. They ultimately received very little value from their last top-five pick, and that’s part of the reason why Thursday night, they find themselves holding another pick in the top-five — except this time, it’s not due to a lottery win. It’s because the club earned it the old-fashioned way: by being one of the league’s worst teams.

GM Chuck Fletcher is obviously looking to add a “franchise-changing” future star. But just as important is avoiding a Patrick redux — a player who totally flops in Philadelphia.

One way to avoid repeating history is to learn from it. So what can Fletcher learn from Hextall’s mistake? What lessons can the Flyers take away from 2017, and the ultimate failure of the last time they had a realistic chance at adding a star at the top of the NHL Draft?

Lesson No. 1: Listen to the scouts

It had been rumored and reported for years that the Flyers’ scouting department wasn’t exactly fully on board with the Patrick pick on draft day in 2017. But it was Flyers senior adviser (and franchise legend) Bob Clarke who removed any doubts that there was legitimate contention in the room that day, famously claiming on the The Cam & Strick Podcast that “none of our scouts wanted Patrick” and strongly implying that if the scouts had their way, the selection would have been Makar, who of course was en route to his first Norris Trophy and a Conn Smythe for added measure.

Now, based on my conversations with sources, I’m skeptical of some of that framing. For starters, my understanding is that the scouting department was essentially split on whether Makar or Heiskanen should have been the top prospect on the Flyers’ board at No. 2, and if anything, it was Heiskanen who had more support. But I do fully believe that Patrick wasn’t the favorite of many scouts, and Hextall went with Patrick anyway.

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Now, in the end, it’s the GM’s call on every draft pick — particularly such an important one. And it’s important to remember that on draft day, the general industry consensus was that there was a two-player top-tier (Patrick and Nico Hischier), so taking one of the defensemen over Patrick would have been a serious against-the-grain pick and certainly would not have been well-received in the moment in Philadelphia. It’s certainly possible that the added pressure of being “not Nolan Patrick” would have hurt the development of the Flyers’ new selection, and history would have played out differently.

That said, talent generally wins out. And in this case, the organization’s scouts — who are paid to evaluate draft-eligible talent — weren’t sold on Patrick and were right to be skeptical. In retrospect, Hextall (and the rest of the organization) surely wishes that he went with their recommendations over drafting his fellow Brandon Wheat King.

The lesson here? There’s a reason why an organization employs and pays its scouts. While the front office ultimately needs to come to a consensus on a pick, the scouts — with the support of a robust analytics department — should be driving the decision. Otherwise, why send them all over the world in the first place? And if said scouts come to a consensus that doesn’t match up with the public sphere’s view of what the pick “should be?” That’s when a GM has to trust that his organization and his people are right, rather than veto them.

Lesson No. 2: Don’t obsess over positional needs

One big reason why Hextall ultimately went with Patrick over either of the two defensemen available? There was almost certainly an element of “tie goes to the positional need.” The Flyers had taken Travis Sanheim with a first-round pick in 2014 and Ivan Provorov with the No. 7 pick in 2015. Shayne Gostisbehere was just one year removed from a magical rookie season. Samuel Morin was still viewed as a viable (if slow-developing) prospect. Hextall understandably looked at his blue line pipeline and felt it wasn’t nearly in need of the kind of boost that the organization required down the middle.

Thus, Patrick, the center, was taken over Heiskanen and Makar. And look what happened.

The takeaway? Especially at the top of the draft, don’t worry about positional need. Yes, the Flyers are weak organizationally down the middle, and beyond Ronnie Attard, don’t have much in the way of viable RHD prospects. But that really shouldn’t influence their decision. In the end, the Flyers desperately need top-end talent — at every single position. That’s far more important than feeling a perceived need that might not even be a need two or three years down the line.

Now, that doesn’t mean that positional need and the “best player available” strategy can’t match up. Perhaps the Flyers’ scouting department truly believes that, say, Cutter Gauthier is the best prospect available and also projects long-term as an impact center rather than a winger. That would be fine. But if the front office is convincing themselves that Gauthier can be an NHL center not because of what their scouts have seen on the ice, but because they perceive the organizational need to just be that glaring, that’s how draft mistakes are made. Even with such a high pick.

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Lesson No. 3: Don’t ignore injury concerns

In Patrick’s defense, injuries played a large role in his inability to live up to his lofty draft slot in Philadelphia. His rookie season was hindered by an abdominal surgery from the previous summer, and he didn’t start flashing his (apparent) potential until the second half of 2017-18. Then, a migraine disorder torpedoed his 2019-20 campaign before it even began, and he’s yet to fully get his career back on track. Some of that is just plain old bad luck.

That said, Patrick did have an injury history heading into the draft. The Flyers picked him anyway.

In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best call.

Most of the players that are realistic options at No. 5 this year don’t come with many injury concerns, though David Jiricek did miss extended time this season due to a knee injury. He returned for the World Championship, but that’s a problem that Flyers doctors need to take very seriously, especially because Jiricek’s primary physical weakness is his mediocre skating ability. If said knee injury has any chance of being a chronic problem that could prevent him from improving in that area into his early 20s, it’s a very good reason to drop him down their draft board.

To be clear — this is not meant to bury Jiricek, a prospect I like quite a lot. But the Patrick pick should serve as a cautionary tale that injury concerns shouldn’t simply be brushed aside. They can linger, and injury-prone players often stay injury-prone as they age.

Lesson No. 4: Take big swings

It’s not that in 2017 Patrick was perceived to have a low ceiling. Players with low ceiling don’t get taken in the top five. He was viewed as a potential do-it-all, all-around right-handed 1C, and those are worth their weight in gold around the NHL.

But there was a general perception in league circles that Patrick lacked superstar potential. On the other hand, Makar was viewed as more of a boom-or-bust prospect due to his elite physical tools in tandem with low level of competition (AJHL). His biggest fans saw him as the next Erik Karlsson, a true game-changer on defense, while skeptics wondered if his game would translate even to the collegiate level in all its creativity and pace.

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Needless to say, the former group was proven right, and Colorado was rewarded in a big way for taking an enormous swing on his upside.

The top six in this draft come with similar distinctions. Shane Wright and to a lesser extent Jiricek are viewed as the “safer” options — near locks to be useful NHLers, but perhaps not possessing true star-level potential. Juraj Slafkovsky, Simon Nemec, Logan Cooley and Gauthier, on the other hand, all are generally perceived to have higher ceilings, though are likely higher risk as well. Slafkovsky didn’t produce much in his main league, saving his best performances for international play. Nemec plays a roving, offensively oriented style from the back end. Cooley’s production has yet to match his prodigious on-ice talent. And Gauthier is more impressive at this point for his physical tools than consistently dominant on-ice play, plus he’s no lock to stick at center.

That said, in order to acquire stars — unless a team lucks into the top pick in a draft with a generational talent — risks must be taken on draft day. Otherwise, teams end up filled with two-way middle-sixers and solid second pair defensemen. Sure, it might result in the occasional high-profile bust. But as the Flyers were reminded with Patrick, even supposedly “safe” prospects can bust. At the top of the draft, the goal should be to come away with a true game-changer, even if it means taking something of a leap of faith.

(Photo: Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)

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