When it comes to the backup goalie position, the Philadelphia Flyers will have a lot of deliberating to do this summer.
Whatever they decide to do with Sam Ersson, though, they cannot allow emotion to be a factor.
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Ersson, 26, is a pending restricted free agent in need of a new contract this summer, but the problem is that he posted a dismal 3.12 GAA and .870 save percentage this season – the worst overall campaign of his NHL career.
That effort follows one in 2024-25 when he wasn’t much better, stumbling to a 3.14 GAA and .883 save percentage.
Through his three seasons as a full-time NHLer, Ersson has not finished one with a save percentage over .890, and his level of play has actually progressively declined each year.
A 2018 fifth-round pick, Ersson has been with the Flyers organization for a total of eight years now.
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“First of all, he’s a great teammate. The guys love him. He’s been here for a while. We’ve invested a lot of years into him,” Flyers general manager Danny Briere said of Ersson at his end-of-season press conference Thursday.
“It was a tough start for Sam, but we also have to give him credit, the way he stuck with it, found a way to bounce back to win some really big games down the road to get into the playoffs. That was impressive. . . We want to sit down and discuss.”
It goes without saying that intangibles and the alchemy of the locker room are often-dismissed performance factors in sports, but they aren’t the be-all, end-all.
Objectively, we have to look at Dan Vladar and recognize that he took the opportunity the Flyers gave him, ran with it, and made Ersson an afterthought while emerging as Philadelphia’s starting goalie.
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Ersson has seen his win totals drop from 23 to 22 to 14 and save percentage plummet from .890 to .883 to .870 over the last three years.
According to MoneyPuck, Ersson allowed 4.8 goals more than expected in 2023-24, 19.9 goals above expected (league-worst) in 2024-25, and 16.5 goals above expected this past year.
The Flyers giving the Swede credit for his post-Olympic break performance is fair, but they did the same thing in 2023-24. That’s how we got here.
Two seasons ago, Ersson was pushing Carter Hart for starts after an injury to the latter and a strong performance in the fall (that followed an awful start).
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Then, Hart had the personal leave and ultimately turned himself in to deal with the sexual assault charge stemming from the 2018 Hockey Canada case, which he was later acquitted of.
Ersson started nearly every game down the road in lieu of the likes of Cal Petersen and Felix Sandstrom and faltered, but the Flyers gave him credit for being burnt out, unprepared, and thrown into a tough situation.
Objectively true, but the Flyers could have made the playoffs that year if they held it together even just a little bit.
Ersson reprised his role as the starter last season, and the platoon of him, Ivan Fedotov, and Aleksei Kolosov was the league’s worst.
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And then came the run this year, when Ersson won five of his last six starts to help send the Flyers to the postseason.
Can the Flyers evaluate a struggling goalie based on a handful of games from stretches from two different seasons?
They already re-signed Aleksei Kolosov to partner up with Carson Bjarnason on the Lehigh Valley Phantoms again this year, and Keith Petruzzelli re-upped for some organizational depth.
Heading into 2026-27, the Flyers’ backup goalie will either be Ersson or someone else, and alternatives like Stuart Skinner, Daniil Tarasov, Eric Comrie, David Rittich, and Sergei Bobrovsky are all more appealing options in free agency.
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It would seem that Ersson’s best chance of returning to Philadelphia comes from the Flyers striking out on one of the above options on the open market, which is an unlikely but not impossible scenario.
The team’s decision to re-sign Kolosov re-emphasizes their patient approach to prospect development; the Flyers clearly have no designs of taking a Bjarnason or Egor Zavragin and throwing them into the NHL ASAP.
Ersson has already had three years of that patience, and regardless of it being him or someone else, anyone who steps in behind Vladar is a placeholder for a young prospect looking to break through in the near future.
The importance of this, though, is a.) having someone reliable to play behind Vladar in the event of injury, and b.) having someone who can perform consistently to help guide the Flyers to the playoffs year over year.
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In recent years, the Flyers’ pro scouts have nailed their evaluations.
They took Sean Walker on from the L.A. Kings as a throw-in for the Ivan Provorov trade, then turned Walker into a first-round pick at the NHL trade deadline.
That same summer, the Flyers signed Ryan Poehling, and eventually turned him and a second-round pick into Trevor Zegras.
Vladar has been a revelation, and Christian Dvorak had a career year this past season as well.
Amateur scouting is a different story, but precedent tells us we can trust the Flyers’ evaluations of current NHLers.
Ersson can very well be, and has the talent to be, a goalie they decide to keep, but the Flyers have to come to that conclusion for the right reasons: watching the tape, believing in the talent, finding the right length and price on a contract.
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It just can’t be an emotional decision because he’s been with the organization for eight years. After making the playoffs this past year, they have too much to lose from making rash decisions in free agency.
