Make no mistake about it — this season, with his first real, extended run of play in the NHL, was an up and down one for Brink. We saw him struggle at times for consistency in his own play, we can acknowledge that, but it’s also worth acknowledging that when you take a look at the season on the whole, on the macro level, Brink still grades out well enough, all things considered.
Remember back, if you will, to his Flyers debut after wrapping up his junior year at Denver and signing his Entry Level Contract back in 2022. We saw him come in, show some real flash, and put up four points in his first 10 games of NHL action, and he left us with some real optimism about his game. Now, a full season removed from that, Brink got his extended look with the Flyers, and while it wasn’t a straight through 57 game sample, we saw pretty similar results from him. Again, he averaged .4 points per game, but this season we saw the goal scoring beginning to break open for him. His 11 goals on the season landed him in a tie for a respectable eighth place among all skaters in goals scored.
The underlying numbers, too, certainly show some positive flashes. With Brink on the ice, the Flyers saw themselves slightly outproduced by both shot attempts and Expected Goals (that is, bested in both shot quantity and quality) while Brink was on the ice, but ultimately this didn’t seem to burn them in the end. In fact, they were outscoring the opponent more often than not when Brink was on the ice this season.
Now, logic may tell us that regression is on its way and they could not continue to out-score their opponents while consistently being out-shot, but this is simply no longer our concern. The season has ended, and they made it out fine. Moving on!
What would help his production stabilize more has to do with his shooting habits, and that’s something that these numbers capture as well. Brink, we know, has a shot that can be absolutely lethal when he really gets going, and while we certainly saw flashes of that this season, the trouble was that shot that can be quickly off his stick and deceptive to goaltenders was often going wide of the net. Indeed, Brink was hitting the net on just over half of his attempts. We’d like to see him shooting more in general (he’s on the low end of the raw shot attempt production numbers among his teammates as well), but particular targeted work on the accuracy of his shot will go a long way towards helping him elevate his game.
Three Questions
Did they live up to expectations?
This is a tricky one, because particularly with Brink, there seemed to be a wide range of expectations for him heading into this season in the first place. For our (sentient blog) purposes, we felt that there was still some work to be done in Brink’s game, and didn’t particularly love the idea of graduating him to the NHL on what appeared to be a full time basis to begin the season, so the fact that he struggled at times, looked a bit lost at times, was not a huge surprise.
Brink is still a very young — not yet 23, mind you — player, still a player with a lot of developing to do, and that we saw this bearing out in both the results and the underlying process is, in a lot of ways, just par for the course. He showed enough offensive flash that we felt validated that we haven’t been overrating him as a prospect up to this point, but there were still enough reminders of the rawness of his game to reinforce a need for patience. There’s still a good player in there, we saw, but there still needs to be some work put in — both by the player and the coaching and development staffs — to extricate him.
What can we expect from him next season?
Our expectation here is actually something closer to a hope. Given what we saw from Brink across the whole of the season (and indeed, in flashes through his time down with the Phantoms in the playoffs), it feels like he could do well to spend a bit more time in the AHL to polish out his game, find a bit more consistency, get his confidence back, all of that jazz. This is just our opinion. But it’s also possible that he comes in this fall like he did last – with a whole bunch of energy and pop, and puts together another impressive training camp, opening up questions of whether he should in fact be given a spot with the NHL squad outright. We could see this happening again too. But where the hope comes in is our hope that, regardless of which path the team decides is best for him – more AHL time or a chance to just figure it out up with the big club – they stick with it. Brink doesn’t seem far away from being full time NHL ready, but the most important thing for a player on this sort of developmental cusp is being given a consistent setting to work through the lingering issues in their game, and this has been missing for Brink up to this point. We’re expecting we’ll see him working through some bumps in the road along to way, to be sure, but he seems primed to take a step forward this coming season.
How do we grade his 2023-24 season?
We’ll admit that we’re grading him on something of a curve here, considering our feelings that he should have started the season in the AHL and spent some time consistently down there to begin the season before ultimately earning a call up, rather than beginning the season with the Flyers and then finding himself bounced between the active lineup, the press box, and the Phantoms. It’s a difficult position for any player to be in, much less one still trying to develop his game into one fitting NHL regular status. But despite all of this, Brink still managed to show some real positive flashes, and as we said, did end up grading out well enough by the stats. So with that all taken into account, we’re going to award him a…
