Flyers’ Rebuild Enters a New Phase

VOORHEES, N.J. – You hear it in the public comments from Daniel Briere and Keith Jones. You see it in the club’s marketing campaign, including the new “Brick by Brick” catchphrase, which is plastered on a banner outside the training facility and will inevitably appear on I-95 billboards and SEPTA buses.

The rebuild, everyone in the Philadelphia Flyers organization is speedy to acknowledge, is still ongoing. There are no illusions that this is a team that can break its now half-century Stanley Cup drought. Ending a five-year absence from the playoffs might even be a stretch.

But there’s a different feel to training camp,which began with the first on-ice drills on Thursday,than there has been in each of the first two years of Briere’s tenure as general manager. The players are aware that management expects the 2025-26 team to be meaningfully better than it has been in the recent past.It certainly shoudl be better, they figure, than the club that finished with the fourth-worst record in the league last season, considering the 2025 offseason was much more about addition than subtraction.

Travis Konecny seemed to welcome the challenge.

“Whether it’s named a rebuild or not, I think as players, you naturally want to finish as high as you can. But I think this year,mentally,you look at it like,we’ve kind of spent enough time down here,” he said,motioning low with his right hand.

The biggest change from this time last year is, of course, the coaching staff. There was no yellow rope stretched from one end of the rink to the other while players tirelessly skated laps at the behest of then-coach John Tortorella, as happened the past three years in a test of their endurance.

A few players joked about that.