Finally in Philly, Pelletier, Kuzmenko join a Flyers team looking for answers

Almost 40 minutes after practice, Andrei Kuzmenko was still on the ice, all by himself.

"I really missed practice with the team," he said Friday afternoon.

A week after being traded, Kuzmenko and Jakob Pelletier arrived to the Flyers during the second period of Thursday night's game. They greeted president of hockey operations Keith Jones and general manager Danny Briere in the club's management suite.

Happy to be done with visa issues and flight troubles, they finally joined their new teammates Friday for practice.

"After the trade, it was a terrible time," Kuzmenko, a 29-year-old from Russia, said. "It was seven days, there's no practice with the team, you wait, wait, wait. Yesterday, I wanted to play, but my flight was canceled. I thought, 'Why, why is this happening? I really want to play and I miss practice with the team.'"

Kuzmenko and Pelletier were acquired by the Flyers in a deal with the Flames. They eventually were able to depart Calgary, Alberta on Wednesday afternoon. They landed in Toronto around midnight for a connecting flight Thursday morning. But after arriving to the airport at 7:30 a.m. ET, their flight to Philadelphia was canceled. Then, their 2 p.m. ET flight was delayed two and a half hours.

"It has been a rough week being kind of by myself a bit, it has been long," Pelletier, a 23-year-old French Canadian, said. "But it's good that I'm here now."

The Flyers will have the two wingers in their lineup Saturday when the team hosts the Penguins (7 p.m. ET/NBCSP). It's the club's final game before the 4 Nations Face-Off. The Flyers will then go 13 days without a game.

As they waited to clear their traveling hurdles, Kuzmenko and Pelletier found some practice time with the WHL's Calgary Hitmen. But a layoff followed by a longer one hasn't made for an ideal transition to a new team.

"After tomorrow, then a break. Why?" Kuzmenko said with a lighthearted laugh. "It's how many days? Twenty days, just one practice with the team. It's so bad. But this is my life. It's OK. I enjoy the work, I enjoy talking with the guys. Very good first day."

Kuzmenko skated on a line with Scott Laughton and Travis Konecny in practice. He has natural scoring ability. He put up 39 goals and 74 points as a rookie in 2022-23 with the Canucks. In 190 games between Vancouver and Calgary, Kuzmenko had 65 goals and 70 assists.

He'll be auditioning with the Flyers as a pending unrestricted free agent.

"I think this is a good team for the future," Kuzmenko said.

Pelletier is expected to play in the Flyers' bottom six after Anthony Richard was placed on waivers for the purpose of him reporting to AHL affiliate Lehigh Valley. Along with Kuzmenko, Pelletier is in audition mode. He's a pending restricted free agent who was a first-round pick of the Flames in 2019. This season with Calgary, he had 11 points (four goals, seven assists) and a plus-10 rating in 24 games. Briere called him a "spunky" player.

"I'm a dog on a bone," Pelletier said. "I'm a guy who plays each shift like it's the last one. I'm not the biggest guy, but I'm going to hit guys, I'm going to go in front of the net, I'm going to do everything in my power to win each game here."

Despite making this trade for the future, the rebuilding Flyers would like some more wins. They've been in a spiral, having lost five straight games and seven of their last eight. They entered the weekend 23-26-7 and with the Eastern Conference's second-to-worst points percentage at .473, ahead of only the Sabres' .462 mark.

"I'm sure everybody around me wants us to tank," John Tortorella said. "I'd like someone to give me a definition: How do you to tell an athlete to tank? How do I go into my locker room and say, 'OK, we're going to tank now, boys?' What do I do? Can someone give me some thoughts on that?"

After moving Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost in the trade, the Flyers went the next three games without Kuzmenko and Pelletier. They've also been without Ryan Poehling for the last 10 games, Egor Zamula for the last seven, Owen Tippett for the last four and Rasmus Ristolainen for the last two. All four are day to day with upper-body injuries.

The Flyers will welcome the break for recovery reasons.

"I think it has been a tough week, it has been a really weird week for us," Tortorella said. "Losing some people, not getting anybody back and then all the injuries kind of toppled us over a little bit. But we fought through. Hopefully we end up with a good result tomorrow, get away from this, I think health comes back to our club.

"I want us to take a run at trying to put a run together because other than six, seven, eight teams in this league, it is a .500 league. We're below .500 now, but you have a good run, you're right back in the thick of things. That's the way I'm approaching it and I still think we have a lot of meaningful games left."