Travis Konecny and Travis Sanheim both made the cut.
The longtime Flyers will play for Team Canada in the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off in February, the league’s roster reveals confirmed Wednesday night.
Rasmus Ristolainen will also be skating for his native Finland in the international tournament, as unveiled earlier Wednesday, and head coach John Tortorella will be an assistant on Mike Sullivan’s staff for Team USA, which was previously announced in August.
There were smiles and cheers at center ice for what appeared to be Sanheim, Konecny, and Ristolainen during the Flyers’ practice in Voorhees on Monday, as observed by The Hockey News’ Siobhan Nolan and other local beats, but afterward, everyone played coy.
“We’ll see what happens,” Sanheim said at his locker, knowing the rosters were still a couple of days away from an announcement. “If I get fortunate enough to represent my country, it’d be a huge honor and something that I’ve worked hard to get to, but like I said, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”
“I think if you watch our practices, we’re always celebrating and having fun, no?” Konecny quipped with a shrug. “No different today. But as far as that stuff, I mean, it’d be an honor. You look forward to those types of things and, yeah, we’ll see what happens.”
Hey, they held some good poker faces.
Sanheim, in his eighth season, has broken out into the Flyers’ top defenseman. Night after night, especially as the blue line went through a recent stretch where it was banged up and spread thin, the 28-year-old rose to the occasion, taking on heavy minutes with each passing game and thriving within them.
He’s skating at an average of 25:30 of ice time so far this season, a career-high by far, and has produced a line of five goals and 10 assists for 15 points, which is third on the Flyers in scoring behind Konecny and rookie Matvei Michkov.
Sanheim also has a plus-2 rating on the season, which for a while, left him as the only plus-rated defenseman on the roster alongside the 22-year-old Emil Andrae, who had only just been called up from the Lehigh Valley Phantoms.
He grew tremendously as a defenseman, in checking, breaking the puck out, and holding it at the far blue line to keep opponents pinned down, and head coach John Tortorella has more than noticed, having made it a point to plead Sanheim’s Team Canada case to the media whenever he’s had the chance to over the past couple of months.
“It’s a compliment to him as far as the difference he wants to try to make,” Tortorella said of Sanheim last month. “The number one thing for me is that’s what’s changed from the first year. He just was out there the first year, for me. Looked good because he could skate, accomplished nothing for me.
“Now where he’s gone to as far as – it started with his conditioning, he put on some weight, some good weight, he felt stronger, and then he started with an attitude, and I think he’s taken off.”
Tortorella has pushed Konecny’s case, too.
The fiery, reactive winger, who signed an eight-year contract extension in the summer to see the Flyers’ rebuild fully through, has driven the team offensively through the first part of the season. In 25 games, Konecny has a team-leading 13 goals and 30 points, putting the 27-year-old well over a point-per-game pace and fourth in points among all right wingers in the NHL as of Monday afternoon.
Last Monday, in the Flyers’ shootout loss to the Vegas Golden Knights at the Wells Fargo Center, Kyle Dubas, the Pittsburgh Penguins general manager and Team Canada’s appointed director of player personnel for the 4 Nations Face-Off, was in attendance and seen conversing with Flyers GM Danny Brière in the press box ahead of puck drop.
Presumably, Dubas was there to get a good look at Sanheim and Konecny in person before the rosters had to be submitted.
Ristolain, a big right-handed shot at 6-foot-4, has also come a long way as a defenseman, steadily playing with tighter gap control and better use of his size and physicality to his advantage ever since Tortorella and associate coach Brad Shaw took over behind the bench going on three years ago.
For the season so far, the 30-year-old has a goal and six assists for seven points through 25 games, but more importantly, he’s plus-1 skating at 20:40 of average ice time.
“He’s really improved his play,” Tortorella said of Ristolainen during his Monday press conference, also dancing around the pending 4 Nations roster reveals.
But now it’s all out there. Three Flyers will be on the international stage later this winter.
The 4 Nations Face-Off will run from February 12-20 in Montreal and Boston, putting the league on pause for a bit to set the stage for the NHL players’ impending return to the Olympics in 2026.
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