Category: Sports

There was a 12-second moment in Game 4 of the Flyers’ first-round series against the Pittsburgh Penguins that perfectly encapsulated who Jamie Drysdale, the hockey player, has become.

In the offensive zone, he got the puck from his good buddy Trevor Zegras at the top of the right circle and snapped a shot on goal. Penguins goalie Artūrs Šilovs made the save, and the puck popped out to Erik Karlsson, who put it down on the ice before springing Rickard Rakell.

Drysdale, using his footwork and quick steps, was able to get back and keep the Penguins veteran forward to the outside before taking him out behind the net. He killed the play and allowed his partner, Cam York, to get the puck.

This is who Drysdale is now.

Although he entered the NHL as an offensive defenseman, he is now strong on both sides of the puck — creating offense, as seen by his career high in goals (eight) and tying his previous best in points (32), and building his defensive game. According to Natural Stat Trick, the Flyers had a 50.5% goal share with Drysdale on the ice.

That is why the Flyers locked up the 24-year-old blueliner with a four-year, $26 million extension on Friday. His $6.5 million average annual value is the highest among the defensemen.

“Philly’s a place that I love to play, and there’s no secret there,” he said on a Zoom call Monday. “I’ll continuously say it. I’m happy with four years [and] would want to continue that after the fact, obviously, and just really excited to show what I can do and keep it going.”

Part of the surge is from his growing confidence. The other part is the work he puts in during the dog days of summer.

Still learning to skate

Skating has always been Drysdale’s best tool. He has relied on it since he was a tyke in Toronto, and continues to do so thanks to the work he puts in. At 7 or 8 years old, he started taking figure skating classes to help his edge work, and then once hockey got serious, around 12 or 13, he started working with a skating coach.

For the last few years, including this summer, he’s headed home and gotten in touch with Dawn Braid, a renowned coach who has consulted with several NHL teams. She was the first woman in NHL history to coach full-time when she joined the Arizona Coyotes in 2016, and currently works for the New York Rangers.

“I always thought, at least in my head, I thought I was a pretty good skater. And then, the first time I worked with Dawn, it was a lot of corrections,” Drysdale told The Inquirer in May. “It makes you feel not so good as a skater and realize that there’s a lot to work on.”

Despite it all, he loves working on his skating, calling it his favorite thing to do in the summer.

“Because when I feel good on my feet, I think that’s when I feel just best on the ice as a whole,” he said. “So, especially to start the summer and to end the summer, I try to get as many sessions as I can to, obviously, set myself up in a good spot for the summer and then set myself up in a good spot for the season.”

It starts standardly, getting his feet wet again and his technique back after being off the ice for a short time; this season was the first time Drysdale made the postseason in his NHL career. As the summer days roll on, the drills progress — he said it’s frustrating because Braid will demo her drills with ease, when the drills are anything but easy — and they become more tailored to what he specifically wants to work on.

For Drysdale, the focus is on being able to cut back or explode out, or cut back with speed. He works on being evasive at the blue line, skating with forwards coming at him, retrievals — “a lot of retrieval stuff we do in terms of footwork, on how to use deception with your feet, things like that” — and transitions.

It has paid off, as seen by that play on Rakell.

“He’s not the biggest guy, maybe, like physically, but he uses his feet to defend,” York said of Drysdale in April. “I think you look across the league, there’s a lot of smaller defensemen who use their feet, and obviously he’s a great skater and can keep up with anybody. So he uses that to his advantage, for sure.

“But I think just confidence for him. He’s starting to figure out what works best for him. And he knows that when his feet are moving like that [in general], he’s effective.”

There’s a good chance that Drysdale will be working on his play with the puck, too. He said at his end-of-season availability that he wanted to work on his puck play, hanging on to pucks, making more plays in the offensive zone, and his shot. He mentioned on Monday that some of his focus is on getting the power play out of the NHL’s basement, specifically with his shot.

“Been pretty continuously working on my shot over the last year and throughout this summer,” he said Monday. “Something that I’m going to come in confident with and use as a weapon, and kind of take it from there.”

Those are offensive elements. But there is no denying that his defensive game has, no pun intended, taken the biggest stride. Across his 24 games in his first season with the Anaheim Ducks, Drysdale had a plus-minus of minus-12. The following year, he played 81 games and was minus-26, and in his first 24 games with the Flyers after being acquired in the Cutter Gauthier trade, he was minus-18.

But that is all behind him. What’s more promising was what he did this past year, going from minus-32 in 2024-25 to minus-3 this past season. It’s not in the positives yet, but it feels like that’s the next step.

“I wouldn’t say it’s too much technical-wise,” he said when asked if he did anything differently with his skating to become stronger defensively in April.

“I think it’s more so just being super comfortable with it, knowing that it’s a strong suit and using it. Like fully believing that it’s my best way to defend because I think I trust my gaps. I can trust my feet to get back. … Yeah, so I think that’s kind of the main thing, is just being more confident in what I can do with my feet.”

From strength to strength

The work Drysdale is doing isn’t just on the ice. He’s also doing it in the gym. Drysdale has worked with Bryan Marshall, program director and founder of Milo Athletics based in Ontario, and a high-performance coach who has worked with several NHL teams, since he was 14 or 15 years old.

He thinks Marshall knows him better than himself when it comes to his work in the gym. And Marshall has seen the blueliner’s growth and development in his on-ice game come from the work he has done off the ice, calling it “inevitable.”

“I think Jamie always had the talent. He always had those natural abilities in his skating. But, at the next level, the real separator is, how efficiently can you repeat that,” Marshall told The Inquirer in April.

“What I’ve noticed over the years is, he has one successful month after another in the summer, and then one successful summer after another,” he added, “and the next thing you know, he’s developed so much more strength and so much more power, and he’s now got the capacity, I think, to sort of really showcase his talents, right, because the rigors of an NHL season are pretty grueling.”

According to Drysdale, the schedule is rigorous, with Mondays and Wednesdays being power days, Tuesdays and Thursdays for strength, and Friday for conditioning. He focuses on power, aerobic capacity on the bike or VersaClimber, ladder work, hip mobility with bands, and explosiveness, like with box jumps. Working with bands and box jumps are his two favorites.

And all the work is done focusing on single-leg work with a priority in preparing Drysdale’s body to receive force.

This summer, he’s also working on his first few steps. Marshall puts his athletes — he also trains former Flyers forward Scott Laughton, now with the Los Angeles Kings — through a comprehensive power assessment via force plates and other pieces of technology. It helps him understand how a player produces power, including force and velocity, and for Drysdale, he saw that as he got stronger, he got faster.

“He’s obviously playing with confidence, and he’s got those reserves — that’s what I like to call it — he’s got a strength reserve, he’s got a power reserve, he’s got a conditioning reserve, an aerobic reserve right now, where he can push it on a play, and maybe there is a turnover, but he’s fine,” Marshall said when the play against Rakell was mentioned.

“He’s not spent; he’s not running on empty, and he can come back and do his thing. And I think his body is allowing him to play with that confidence that he’s obviously shown this year.”

Confidence has become a big word for Drysdale this past year.

In the Elite Prospects 2020 NHL draft guide, Drysdale’s scouting report called him a “brilliant skater” but someone who “doesn’t seem to know he is by far the best skater on the ice.”

It feels like he knows that now.

“The biggest step, I think, was just confidence level,” he said in May. “That might not be like an actual hockey thing, but I think just coming to the rink and believing that I was a good player and could make an impact, that was probably the biggest kind of shift for me. And I guess that kind of carries all over the ice. …

“I think there’s a lot of things that I want to work on, and I think I can bring a lot more to the table as well in certain areas. So I think overall, pretty happy with it, but I think, yeah, a lot of work will be done.”