This offseason, the Philadelphia Flyers will be spending the bulk of their finances re-signing their own free agents, rather than those coming from other teams.
Established core players like Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale are pending restricted free agents in need of new contracts, and it's possible the Flyers retain the likes of Nikita Grebenkin (upper-body), Sam Ersson, and Emil Andrae.
The Flyers already re-signed Aleksei Kolosov, so that is one piece of relevant business done for the summer. Now, they won't have to worry about AHL goaltending for the 2026-27 season.
As for the names above, though, their contracts are going to be less straightforward than Kolosov's one-year deal worth $850k.
In regards to Zegras and Drysdale specifically, those two players are going to be the talk of town in terms of contract value and length.
We can all expect the Flyers' exciting duo to sign for another couple of years, though what a "couple of years" means depends on the person.
NHL analytics mavens Evolving-Hockey have made their widely anticipated contract projections for the 2026 offseason available, and we can reference their data model to see what kind of contracts we can expect for all the Flyers' free agents.
To establish some precedent, Evolving-Hockey projected Kolosov's most likely contract to be two years for $866.5k. The Belarusian was assessed to have a 48% chance to sign for two years, and a 42% chance to sign for one. So, they were pretty close to the mark on this one.
At the time of this writing, Zegras is given a 23% chance to re-up with the Flyers for four years, which Evolving-Hockey predicts to come with a $7.589 million annual cap hit.
Notably, their model also gives Zegras a 19% chance to sign for five and eight years, and those lengths would then carry cap hits of $7.919 or $9.654 million, respectively.
Personally, I would expect Zegras and the Flyers meet somewhere in the middle, like seven years and $8.5 million annually, give or take.
The 25-year-old could sign almost any deal, though, and it would be a big win for Philadelphia. Anything that keeps him an important piece of the future is a success.
However, the Flyers will have a smaller margin for error with Drysdale's next deal, especially given that this past season was the best, and objectively the only good, season of his NHL career.
The 24-year-old defenseman's most likely contract comes in at five years and a $6.155 million annual cap hit, which will certainly carry some sticker shock.
A number in the $5 million range would be more reasonable for Drysdale, though Evolving-Hockey's model says the Flyers will have to offer between two and four years to get the price down to that level.
As it stands for the other relevant pieces, Ersson is projected to land a two-year, $2.762 million AAV contract if he re-signs with the Flyers, which seems unlikely at this stage.
Andrae and Grebenkin are given whopping 56% and 58% chances to land two-year extensions themselves, accompanied by modest cap hits of $1.462 and $1.127 million, respectively.
Grebenkin's is just about what I personally expected, though a one-year deal feels like the smartest move for Andrae.
He only has a 16% chance to sign one of those, but he is no longer waivers-exempt and won't be an unrestricted free agent until 2029.
If Andrae does remain with the Flyers, it would be surprising if it was for more than a season, even with the team's lack of left-shot defensemen coming up through the pipeline.
The Flyers will have a ton of cap space this summer with Kevin Hayes, Cam Atkinson, and Scott Laughton all coming off the books, so it will be interesting to see how aggressive they get with re-signing their own players as well as with targeting new ones.
