Philadelphia Flyers: 5 Under the radar preseason players to watch

4. Taylor Leier

Taylor Leier started last season on the Flyers fourth line but finished the season playing just 39 games. He was in and out of Dave Hakstol’s lineup, never finding a consistent spot in the Flyers forward lines. It’s possible that his lack of scoring was the reason behind this last season.

Leier had just five points (1 goal, 4 assists) for the team in the 2017-2018 campaign. The Flyers lacked scoring production throughout their bottom-six all season, and Leier obviously wasn’t helping that cause.

It’s not like he didn’t show promise, though. The line combination of Leier, Scott Laughton, and Michael Raffl lead other Flyers line combinations in Corsi-For percentage (CF%) and were second in Relative Corsi-For (Rel CF%) percentage with at least 100 TOI minutes, per Corsica.com. While this line didn’t score much, they still controlled play at a good rate while together.

Leier himself posted a 51.7 CF% and a 53.1 Fenwick-For percentage (FF%) last season. The team controls the puck more with him on the ice, so why couldn’t he score? Leier had just a 2.1 shooting percentage, which is horribly low. This could suggest that he just had bad luck putting the puck on-net, especially given he never had a shooting percentage below nine during his AHL career per theahl.com.

Taylor will be fighting for a fourth line wing position come training camp and preseason. He’ll have to show more of a scoring touch if he hopes to make the Flyers lineup. I wouldn’t put it past Hextall to possibly trade Leier for a late round pick to give him a chance to play for an NHL team, similar to what he did with Nick Cousins last year, which Leier does deserve.