On draft day in 2017, the Philadelphia Flyers decided to trade Brayden Schenn to the St. Louis Blues for a first round pick (27th overall) and a future first conditional round pick.
Schenn avoided his arbitration hearing by mere minutes in 2016 and signed on the dotted line for 4 years and $20.5 million. Arbitration hearings are a big no-no in hockey and it wasn’t necessarily shocking that Ron Hextall shipped him out the following year.
Hextall was enamoured with Morgan Frost and with the young playmaker still available at the back-end of the 2017 draft, he decided to swing for the deal. The following season, the Flyers used the second first rounder from the deal to draft Joel Farabee who then later committed to Boston University for one season. Farabee ended up making his NHL debut in 2019-20 when he appeared in 52 games and chipped in with 21 points. He added 3 goals and 5 points in 12 playoff games but the sky was the limit for the young forward.
The following season as a 20-year-old he broke the 20-goal barrier and chipped in with 18 assists in 55 games during the COVID-shortened season and then added 17 goals and 34 points in 63 games last season. This season, especially without Cam Atkinson and Sean Couturier, the Flyers were hoping to lean on the 22-year-old offensively but by the end of June 2022, the Flyers announced that he was expected to miss 3-4 months to recover from having disk replacement surgery in his cervical region.
He was supposed to miss the start of the season and most pegged him to return before November but he miraculously showed up just in time for the season opener. The Flyers were severely hampered with injuries to even start the season, so perhaps he was rushed back because he didn’t look like the Farabee of 2020 to start the year. In fact, this entire season something has seemed off with his game, he’s a step slower, he’s not shooting the puck as much, he’s not as aggressive, and most games he’s non-existent even with his top-6 and sometimes top-9 roles.
Before Monday’s game against the Calgary Flames, John Tortorella juggled his lines once again and had Joel Farabee penciled in as the fourth line centre with Olle Lycksell and Wade Allison. He ended up playing 3:52 and was benched for half of the second period and the entire third period – even with Travis Konecny out of the game by that point. The Flyers hung on to win the game and had players like Scott Laughton (21:25), Owen Tippett (18:54), Noah Cates (17:49), and Kevin Hayes (17:28), leading the charge offensively.
Farabee started the season without a point in his first 4 games before scoring 5 goals and 14 points in the following 18 games. Since then he has recorded 4 goals and 12 points in his last 36 games, 1 goal and 5 points in his last 19 games, and 0 goals and 1 assist in his last 15. Before Monday’s late afternoon game he was only averaging 13:31 of ice time over his last 7 games, including 11:37 against the Winnipeg Jets, 11:17 against the Nashville Predators (an overtime game to boot), and 10:21 against the Vancouver Canucks. He’s also only taken 20 shots in his last 15 games, which is a concerning sign for a player tabbed as a goal-scorer for a team that severely lacks finishers.
It could very well be a dry spell or a just a rough season, as heading into Tuesday he is 5th in his draft class in points with 119 behind Andrei Svechnikov (255), Brady Tkachuk (252), Rasmus Dahlin (219), and Quinn Hughes (217), however over his young career he has shown flashes of very hot versus very cold. In 2020-21, a year where he broke the 20-goal barrier on a bad Flyers team, he endured a slump where he scored 1 goal and 4 points over an 18-game stretch. You could even push that a little further to 4 goals in a 27-game stretch. Yes, it was his sophomore season and playing on a team that just sunk like the Titanic couldn’t have been easy.
Then we have 2021-22 where he scored 1 goal in a 14-game stretch at the beginning of the season, then had a 12 game goalless drought from mid-January to mid-March (mixed in with injuries), and then finished the season with 2 goals in his last 15 games. That could also be chalked up to the team around him but thats 3 very lengthy dry spells where even if you take out the goals, he only added 6 assists – all of which he recorded during his second dry spell.
The offense this seasons has been dictated by 3 players and 3 players only: Travis Konecny, Kevin Hayes, and Tony DeAngelo. The Flyers have gotten nice runs out of Morgan Frost, Owen Tippett, James van Riemsdyk, and even Noah Cates, but the more consistent production has come from the aforementioned trio. We witnessed during Konecny’s 13-game goalless drought that the offense goes as he goes and over his last 3 games he has scored 3 goals and chipped in with 2 assists so hopefully his injury is not serious and he can return to the lineup tomorrow.
Hayes and DeAngelo were 2 of a handful of players who actually produced over the last 15 games when players like Konecny, Farabee, Frost, Tippett, and van Riemsdyk suffered excruciating droughts. With not many options to choose from, Farabee should have a chance for redemption in short order since the only real threat to jump back in the lineup is Kieffer Bellows. Tyson Foerster, Bobby Brink, and Elliot Desnoyers have done splendidly in the AHL but it doesn’t seem like their time is just ripe at the moment. However after the trade deadline is over and some roster spots have opened, they should be knocking at the door with how well they’ve played this year for the Lehigh Valley Phantoms.
Farabee is only a few days removed from turning 23 years old, he’s extremely young, has a lot of potential and talent, but the Flyers need to see that right now. His surgery was a difficult one and it was reported to have been the same as the ones that Jack Eichel and Tyler Johnson underwent as well. He rushed his return and it’s rather apparent because when he’s on his game he is extremely noticeable, unfortunately we haven’t seen that brand in months.
Farabee represents the future of the Flyers’ wing and is playing in the first year of a 6-year deal that goes through the end of 2027-28 at a cap hit of $5 million dollars. Here’s hoping that the most recent benching fires him up just as it did to Travis Konecny and Kevin Hayes back in October. The Flyers desperately need his production 5-on-5 and more importantly on the power play where they still sit in the bottom-3.
He’s never represented himself as a threat on the man advantage as evidenced by his 5 career power play markers, but he’s one of the only “goal scorers” the Flyers currently have on the roster, and they need him to return to the 16.4% and 14.3% shooting clips from 2020-21 and 2021-22.
