Flyers finally get Ryan Ellis’ contract off the books in a swap with San Jose Sharks

Time to unplug the countdown clock. The unthinkable has happened.

While fans were awaiting the reveal of the 23-man roster the Flyers will take into the 2025-26 season, general manager Danny Brière made a move no one saw coming — or thought could come.

On Sunday, the Flyers cut ties with Ryan Ellis, sending the defenseman’s contract and a conditional sixth-round pick in the 2026 NHL draft to the San Jose Sharks for forward Carl Grundström and American Hockey League defenseman Artem Guryev. The Sharks will receive the earlier of the two picks the Flyers have in the sixth round. One pick is from the trade that sent goalie Ivan Fedotov to the Columbus Blue Jackets in September.

Ellis was acquired from the Nashville Predators for defenseman Philippe Myers and former No. 2 pick Nolan Patrick — who was flipped to the Vegas Golden Knights — in July 2021 by then-general manager Chuck Fletcher.

Hopes were high with Ellis on the blue line, and, in 2022, then-NBC Sports Philadelphia analyst Keith Jones, the current Flyers president, called the trade a “steal” for the Flyers. Philly needed a right-handed defenseman to pair with Ivan Provorov and wanted to move on from Patrick. An offensive playmaker, but an undersized defenseman at 5-foot-10, Ellis became a “gritty, really hardworking, give-all-he’s-got” defenseman whose play transcended his size, according to former Tampa Bay Lightning general manager Brian Lawton.

“He was a very noticeable, [a] very important player for Nashville on a blue line that had a lot of different options back there,” Jones said of Ellis, the 11th overall pick in 2009. “So it made sense that he would be expendable because they’ve had such a good blue line for so long. It would be seemingly difficult for them to keep all those pieces.”

But Ellis played only four games for the Flyers — notching five points — before suffering a career-ending back injury on Nov. 13, 2021.

The contract has two seasons left with a salary-cap hit of $6.25 million per year. According to Puckpedia, taking Ellis’ money off the books and adding Grundström‘s $1.8 million moves the Flyers from $1,791,905 of cap space and a little over $8 million at the deadline to $7,240,238 and more than $33 million, respectively.

Reports indicate Grundström has been placed on waivers, which means the Flyers can bury his $1.8 million cap hit with just $650,000 on the books.

The move also means the Flyers, who were up against the cap before the trade, will not have to use long-term injured reserve to give them flexibility at any point this season. If the Flyers had finished the season using long-term injured reserve to spend over the cap, they would have had any bonus overages deducted from next year’s salary cap, which is expected to rise to $104 million.

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Puckpedia has the Flyers’ projected cap space at more than $46 million heading into July 1, but the team has several restricted free agents, including forwards Trevor Zegras, Bobby Brink, and Nikita Grebenkin, defensemen Jamie Drysdale and Egor Zamula, and goalie Sam Ersson in the NHL.

In the minors, forwards Karsen Dorwart, Alexis Gendron, Jacob Gaucher, and Samu Tuomaala, defensemen Hunter McDonald, Emil Andrae, and Ethan Samson, and goalie Aleksei Kolosov will be restricted free agents.

The Sharks, by the way, have almost $35 million in dead cap space, and acquired the contract of goalie Carey Price from the Montreal Canadiens on Sept. 5. Price, who has not played since the 2021-22 season, has a cap hit of $10.5 million with the contract expiring after this season.

A bottom-six player who plays a heavy game, Grundström has had an up-and-down career since being selected in the second round of the 2016 draft by the Toronto Maple Leafs. Part of the trade that sent Jake Muzzin to Toronto in January 2019 and then traded to the Sharks this summer, the 27-year-old Swede has played 292 games across seven NHL seasons.

Selected by the Sharks in the fifth round of the 2021 draft, Guryev spent last season in the ECHL after splitting 2023-24 between the ECHL and the San Jose Barracudas of the AHL.

The 22-year-old Russian played for Peterborough and Flint in the Ontario Hockey League, alongside current Flyers prospect Tucker Robertson and former prospect Jon-Avon Randall, who was traded to Seattle for Robertson this summer, and 2021 pick Brian Zanetti with the Petes.

Brière has set the curve. The long game has always been the focus for the Flyers, but the end is coming. For a while now, all signs have been pointing to next summer as a big one for the Flyers.

This move sets them up even further, as they shed quite a chunk of salary that they would have still had to pay next season. And with the rest of the dead money being paid to Cam Atkinson, Kevin Hayes, and Scott Laughton also coming off the books, the proverbial door Brière has mentioned is pretty wide-open now.

Grade: A