Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Travis Sanheim’s season is not over just yet. Sanheim will join Team Canada for the 2022 IIHF Men’s World Championships in Tampere and Helsinki, Finland, after being selected by a management group led by former Arizona Coyotes legend Shane Doan.
This is Sanheim’s first international appearance at the senior level, as he last represented Team Canada at the 2016 World Junior Championships that were coincidentally also in Helsinki. Sanheim registered an assist in five games that tournament.
Sanheim has also played for Team Canada at the 2014 IIHF World U18 Junior Championships in Lappeenranta and Imatra, Finland during his draft year, helping lead his squad to a bronze medal, and he also suited up for Canada Western at the 2013 World Under-17 Hockey Challenge in Drummondville and Victoriaville, Québec, a tournament in which current Flyers teammate Oskar Lindblom led all players with 8 goals and 13 points.
The 26 year-old Elkhorn, Manitoba native is coming off perhaps his best season as a Flyer despite the team’s putrid performance this year. Sanheim racked up seven goals and 24 assists for 31 points in 80 games this season, all just shy of previous career-highs set in 2018-19, but his defensive game took a massive leap forward and he was consistently Philadelphia’s top defenseman in all three zones of the ice. He averaged 22:58 of ice time and saw career-highs in takeaways (23), hits (64), plus-minus (+9), and blocked shots (142) while primarily playing second-pair minutes with Rasmus Ristolainen.
For his efforts this past season, Sanheim received the Pelle Lindbergh Memorial Trophy as the Flyers’ most improved player, becoming the first two-time winner in the history of the award, and he also won the Barry Ashbee Trophy as the Flyers’ top defenseman as well, a career-first for Sanheim.
Sanheim has recorded 29 goals and 87 assists for 116 points in 335 career NHL contests, all with Philadelphia. The 2014 first-round draft selection of the Flyers is entering the final year of a two-year, $9,350,000 contact he signed on August 21st, 2021, and will look to command a nice payday by the end of next season, and right now a selection to the most prestigious international hockey program in the world is a nice little reward for how he’s performed so far.
