6:42 pm: CapFriendly has learned the details of Ersson’s two-year extension. The young netminder will earn $1MM in base salary plus a $300K signing bonus in 2024-25, while he’ll get $1.6MM in base salary with no bonuses in 2025-26.
9:37 am: The Flyers have locked up one of their goalies of the future, announcing that they’ve signed Samuel Ersson to a two-year contract extension that runs through the 2025-26 season. The extension will carry a cap hit of $1.45MM.
The 23-year-old made his NHL debut in 2022-23, getting into a dozen games with Philadelphia where he certainly held his own, posting a 3.07 GAA along with a .899 SV%. He became just the second goalie in franchise history to win his first six decisions. Ersson spent most of the year at the AHL level with Lehigh Valley where he put up a 2.84 GAA and a .900 SV% in 42 appearances, finishing sixth league-wide in minutes played (2,511) and victories (24).
A fifth-round pick of the Flyers back in 2018 (143rd overall), Ersson still has one year remaining on his entry-level contract, a deal that carries an AAV of $925K.
With the Flyers acquiring Cal Petersen and still having Felix Sandstrom in the fold (plus the ongoing Ivan Fedotov saga as the team tries to get the IIHF to recognize his tolled contract), it seemed like Ersson, who is still waiver-exempt, was a strong candidate to go back to the Phantoms next season. That way, he’d have an opportunity to play the bulk of the games once again.
On the surface, this contract implies otherwise. For the Flyers to commit two years at $1.45MM on a one-way deal to Ersson a year early, it’s reasonable to infer that they expect him to see a reasonable amount of NHL action next season. If not, it probably wouldn’t have cost them this much to sign Ersson a year from now. As a result, he might not just be a goalie of the future for Philadelphia but one of their goalies of the present as well.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Ersson is 23
Yup. If he were 21, he couldn’t have been drafted in 2018. The league doesn’t draft 16 year olds. If they did, Gretzky wouldn’t have gone to the WHA.
Ideally Petersen is buried and Sandstrom is gone.
The Lehigh Valley Phantoms were actually a pretty good team last year. But they got positively destroyed by Cup champion Hershey, who they played 14 times, so it skewed their numbers. I bet Ersson never wants to see anyone in chocolate and white again!
Are they preparing for the possibility of a suspension based on the outcome of the 2018 WJC scandal??
Ersson played quite well given the horrid D in front of him last season. This is just a matter of locking in a young goalie for cheap.