The Flyers’ big activity has continued on! The Flyers packaged a couple of picks (the 150th and the 177th) in order to move up into the fourth round.
With that pick, they’ve selected Heikki Ruohonen, a center who just wrapped up his second season with Kiekko-Espoo’s U20 team in Finland.
The 95th ranked player by Elite Prospects, of him in their draft guide, they write: “A two-way centre who drives play, pushes the pace and has some power forward qualities; will the sense and skill be good enough for a top-nine NHL role?”
FloHockey’s Chris Peters adds of Ruohonen that he is heading to the USHL with the “Dubuque Fighting Saints next year,” and also that he “liked his game a lot at the U18s. He was 97th on my list. Hard worker with some scoring ability.”
In his draft season, Ruohonen scored 20 goals and 47 points in 37 games with Kiekko-Espoo. He’ll be taking a bit longer of a development journey, as he’ll spend one season in the USHL before heading to Harvard for the 2026-27 season, but there’s certainly some interesting potential here for him. He’s far from a sure thing, we’ll acknowledge, but the Flyers added another good sized (he’s listed at 6’1 and 196 pounds, as it stands) center with a reasonable sound offensive toolkit into their mix, as they continue to fill out that area of their pipeline.
It’s been an active day, and it’s still far from over. And it’s clear through all of these moves already that the Flyers have a clear vision of their own of what they’re looking for and how they’re hoping this draft will pan out for them, and they’re taking an active role in ensuring that things do pan out their way. We’ll be keeping an eye out as the day goes on, and the vision continues to reveal itself.
