With the 2024 NHL Entry Draft right around the corner, we look back at the 2019 NHL Entry Draft when the Philadelphia Flyers – perhaps surprisingly – selected Cam York with the 14th overall pick instead of Cole Caufield, who many had dubbed as the top sniper in the draft.
Setting the stage for the 2019 Draft, the Flyers finished the 2018-19 season with a 37-37-8 record, which was good for 6th in the Metropolitan, 11th in the East, and 22nd in the NHL. The Flyers had the 10th-best odds on obtaining the first overall pick but because New Jersey jumped up 2 spots, the New York Rangers jumped 4 spots, and Chicago jumped 9 spots for 1-2-3, respectively, the Flyers dropped one spot down to number 11.
This was also Chuck Fletcher’s first draft as the Flyers’ general manager after Ron Hextall was fired midseason. Understanding the landscape of the draft, Fletcher moved down from 11 to 14 with Arizona – while also acquiring a 2nd round pick – because he knew they were going to take Victor Söderström and that Florida was going to take goaltender Spencer Knight at 13.
The Minnesota Wild drafted Matthew Boldy with the 12th overall pick, leaving the Flyers with the player they had always wanted at 14. For almost every fan within Flyers nation, the prevailing thought was that they were going to draft their coveted sniper in Caufield – who had slipped considerably at this point in the draft. Instead, Fletcher drafted York from the same USNTDP, and that left many scratching their heads.
Montréal selected Caufield with the very next pick and has been rubbing it in our faces ever since. Caufield committed to the University of Wisconsin for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons where he tallied a combined 49 goals and 88 points in 67 games, including 30 goals and 52 points in just 31 games in 2020-21. He made the leap to professional hockey at the end of the year where he scored 3 goals and 4 points in 2 games for the Laval Rocket of the AHL and 4 goals and 5 points in 10 games for the big club.
Caufield was also an influential piece of the Canadiens’ playoff run that saw them make a surprise run to their first Stanley Cup Final appearance since 1993, posting 4 goals and 12 points in 20 playoff games.
In 2021-22, Caufield scored 23 goals and 43 points in 67 games during his rookie season and improved to 26 goals and 36 points in just 46 games the following year, before hitting career-highs with 28 goals and 65 points in a full 82-game season in 2023-24. Overall, he has 81 goals and 149 points in 205 games played along with his 12 points in 20 postseason games that all came in 2021.
For York, he essentially followed the same path as Caufield as he committed to the University of Michigan for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons before making the leap to professional hockey after his college season wrapped up. While with Michigan, York scored 9 goals and 36 points in 54 games, including 20 points in 24 games in his final year. Once his season came to a close, he made the jump and appeared in 3 games with the Flyers and 8 games with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms.
He started the 2021-22 season with the Phantoms where he tallied 2 goals and 12 points in 34 games. He made his season debut with the Flyers in January of 2022 and finished the year with 3 goals and 10 points in 30 games. After a strong finish to the season, many believed that York had his name stapled to the Opening Night roster for the 2022-23 season.
With John Tortorella added into the mix, York struggled mightily in his first few pre-season games and was immediately cut from the roster and sent down to the minors. It was definitely seen as a shock, considering the lack of talent on the back-end and how highly touted York was compared to his counterparts. However, this was the first real “Tortorella moment” in Philadelphia and it paid off.
York went down to the Phantoms and crushed it with 3 goals and 13 points in just 20 games. He got called up in December and finished the year with 54 games and 20 points under his belt. Tortorella was exceedingly impressed by his mental fortitude to be able to handle the demotion as well as he did and the fact that he came back with a bang.
2023-24 was the first year that York made it through to Opening Night and he managed to play his first full 82-game season with 10 goals and 30 points. Offensively, it wasn’t the year that we expected from York but he flourished in other capacities. All 10 of his goals and 22 of his 30 points came while playing even-strength hockey, he averaged 22:37 of ice time per game, fired 134 shots on goal, finished 76 hit and recorded 174 blocked shots, and finally saw a lion’s share of power play time with 171.1 minutes.
York also went from 21.6 shorthanded minutes in 54 games in 2022-23 to 192.3 minutes in 2023-24, his even-strength CF% and FF% increased by a couple percentage points, and by the end of the season he was playing like the number one defenseman they were hoping to see from day one.
He was averaging 24:55 of ice time in his final 24 games, tallied 12 points in that stretch, and was only -2 considering all the blowout losses that ensued during the collapse. He saw 23 minutes or more in 17 games during that stretch, 25 minutes or more 14 times, and 27 minutes or more 5 times – including 29:01 on March 21st against the Carolina Hurricanes. Included in that final 24-game stretch was 67 blocked shots, which was something he added to his arsenal this season after blocking just 69 shots in 54 games in 2022-23 and 40 blocked shots in 30 games in 2021-22.
From the beginning of the season to mid-February, the Flyers’ back-end looked pretty good for once. After years of suffering through pylons and Swiss cheese-like defences, the makeshift group that included Sean Walker, Nick Seeler, Jamie Drysdale, Rasmus Ristolainen, and Egor Zamula – with York and Travis Sanheim – was a bright spot and a contributing factor to the team’s surprising season. However, when Ristolainen, Drysdale, and Seeler went down in a heap and then Walker was traded ahead of the deadline, there wasn’t much left, which then forced Tortorella to push the envelope on his top pair.
It was a good season from both Sanheim and York and if they can duplicate or even ameliorate from 2023-24, that would put the Flyers in a really good spot to rebound from their disastrous finish. Whether or not the goal was to make the playoffs, ending their season the way they did really put a souring mark on an otherwise fantastic leap from the previous three seasons.
Looking at things now, the Flyers made the right call in drafting the defenseman over the scoring winger. While it’s true that the Flyers don’t possess real goal scorers other than Travis Konecny and Owen Tippett, they have a slew of wingers and not enough centres amongst their forwards. Caufield would be an immediate upgrade on most forwards currently on the team, but without York, the Flyers’ defence is in absolute tatters.
It was seen as a head-scratching move at the time because Philadelphia had used a lot of their previous draft capital on drafting defensemen and most of them were NHL-ready. Sanheim, Ivan Provorov, Shayne Gostisbehere, Robert Hägg, and I drafted free agent Phil Myers were on the NHL roster and then Fletcher added Matt Niskanen and Justin Braun in the summer of 2019.
In only a few years, the Flyers had to contend with Niskanen’s sudden retirement in 2020, Gostisbehere, Hägg, and Myers were traded in the summer of 2021, and Ryan Ellis lasted 4 games, leaving Braun, Provorov, and Sanheim in the mix. Braun was dependable but nothing more than a bottom-6 defenseman, Provorov looked like a shell of himself after Niskanen retired, and Sanheim couldn’t put forth consecutive consistent seasons. Drafting York gave the Flyers a potential top-pair defenseman amidst all the chaos that ensued.
At this stage today, Caufield and York are neck-and-neck. Caufield has the fancier numbers with the goals and the points, but it boils down to team need. Do the Flyers need a potential top-pair defenseman more or is there a more pressing need for a scoring winger? Take your pick at this rate, but building from the back-end is a whole lot harder than fortifying your offence. It’s almost impossible to find top-2 or top-4 defensemen on the open market either through trade or free agency, but scoring wingers are “more” available, if we’re comparing apples to oranges.
Development matters as well and it seemed like something went awry between 2018 and 2023 because most of the Flyers’ coveted prospects didn’t pan out. We look at the pipeline today and they have the likes of Emil Andrae, Ronnie Attard, Helge Grans, Adam Ginning, and Zamula on the cusp of becoming NHL-regulars as well as prospects like Hunter McDonald, Ethan Samson, and Oliver Bonk, but outside of Bonk, they don’t necessarily hold the same gravitas as York or even Sanheim with the exception of Andrae, which is an even more pressing issue. 2024-25 is going to be a big season for a lot of these defensemen in their development and their trajectories to becoming NHLers. There’s a ton of potential and talent amongst that group but the Flyers need to see more productivity and action in year two of their rebuild.
As for York and Caufield, defensemen generally take a lot longer to develop and while 2023-24 was a good stepping stone in his young career, York really needs to take a further step – or two – in 2024-25 to truly solidify his status and the Flyers’ trust. He will be due for a new contract in the summer of 2025 and will assuredly get a modest raise from his current 2-year deal that was worth $3.2 million. He will be an RFA once again and with over a projected $35 million to play with, the Flyers will make him a top priority alongside Tyson Foerster and potentially Konecny.
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