Flyers promote veteran forward to team captain

The Philadelphia Flyers have announced that Sean Couturier will become the 20th captain in the team’s history. Couturier has spent the previous four seasons as an alternate captain. 

He will serve as Philadelphia’s first captain since Claude Giroux, who held the title for 10 seasons. 

Couturier has played in 50 games this season, scoring 11 goals and 33 points. It’s his first appearance in the regular season since the 2021-22 campaign when he played in just 29 games before injuries forced a 22-month absence. 

The 30-year-old center received Selke votes in every season from 2013-14 to 2020-21, winning the award in 2020.

Couturier has spent all 12 seasons of his career with the Flyers. He was drafted eighth overall in the 2011 NHL Draft, joining a strong top 10 that’s seen all of its players play in at least 700 NHL games. 

Couturier jumped into the NHL immediately after, scoring 27 points in 77 games as a rookie in 2011-12. His scoring totals never jumped much higher than that, with Couturier’s positives coming more on the defensive side of the puck, until the 2017-18 season when he exploded for 31 goals and 76 points in his first season as Philadelphia’s top center. 

As the role maintained, so did his scoring, with Couturier netting 33 goals and 76 points and then 22 goals and 59 points in the next two seasons. He was on pace for strong scoring again in the shortened 2020-21 season, with 41 points in 45 games.

That scoring prowess hasn’t stuck around as much this season, with Couturier on pace for just 54 points, but his presence has been a major contributor to the successes of linemates like Owen Tippett, Travis Konecny and Joel Farabee.

Couturier is in the second year of an eight-year, $62M contract extension signed in 2021. The deal will take him to the 2029-30 season, when Couturier will be 37, and carries a $7.75M cap hit every season. 

Flyers general manager Daniel Briere has put energy towards building out the team’s future framework and, after extending top forward Owen Tippett and bottom-six fixture Ryan Poehling, he now finds his captain for the decade.