Flyers Offer Sheet Target Mavrik Bourque No Longer Within Reach

The Flyers could have gotten a middle-six center in Mavrik Bourque with minimal effort. (Photo: Eric Hartline, Imagn Images)

The shrinking list of offseason Philadelphia Flyers trade targets and offer sheet gambles just got a whole lot smaller.

On Friday, the Dallas Stars announced that they had re-signed forward Mavrik Bourque, a pending restricted free agent and commonly linked Flyers trade and potential offer sheet target, to a one-year contract worth $950k.

Theoretically, the Flyers could still always attempt trade for Bourque anyway, but the Stars would then have to replace their former first-round pick with another player with an equal amount of talent at that same price, which is wholly unlikely.

For the Flyers, using an offer sheet would have been the best way to acquire Bourque, who can play center and wing, from the Stars.

A looming salary cap crunch saw the Stars trade Mason Marchment and his $4.5 million cap hit to the Seattle Kraken for a 2025 fourth-round pick and 2026 third-round pick on Thursday night.

This was just one of what will be many difficult decisions made to help keep star winger Jason Robertson in Dallas beyond 2026.

Should the Flyers have signed Bourque to an offer sheet that paid him between $2.34 million and $4.68 million, they would have compensated the Stars with only a 2026 second-round pick.

Instead, the Flyers are looking increasingly likely to not make any major external additions to their roster for the second consecutive offseason, recent Alexander Romanov trade links notwithstanding.

And with a potential Marco Rossi trade all but out of momentum at this point in the offseason, Philadelphia is more or less out of options outside of, say, Mason McTavish from Anaheim.

Buffalo's Ryan McLeod could always be a workaround, but he's less likely to be a true top-six center at the NHL level than Rossi or McTavish.

But, with just a week to go until the 2025 NHL Draft, it appears the Flyers have taken the conservative approach to the offseason to this point.