As he did last year, top center prospect Jett Luchanko has made the Philadelphia Flyers ahead of opening night, but it's still uncertain as to whether he's truly ready for NHL action.

The Flyers themselves don't appear to know what they want to do yet either, and it will affect their lineup as well as the development of the player.

Luchanko, 19, played four NHL games for the Flyers last year, 46 games for the OHL Guelph Storm, 16 total games for the AHL Lehigh Valley Phantoms, and five games for the Canada U20s at World Juniors.

That's a lot of bouncing around for a player who had previously only played for Guelph and Canada's U18 and U17 squads in the two seasons prior.

"It can't be a steady diet of it, not playing. You've got to be careful," Flyers head coach Rick Tocchet said of Luchanko on Monday. "It's that rule, you know? That sweet spot, if a guy can't play in the minors, you have to send him to junior. We're stuck in that situation a little bit. It happened with Barrett Hayton with me in Arizona. You can't have guys sitting around too much, so we got to figure that out."

The NCAA could have been a viable route for Luchanko, as it was for 2025 first-round pick Porter Martone this summer, if he hadn't signed his entry-level deal with the Flyers so soon as a week after being drafted.

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The ever-divisive Zeev Buium played college hockey at the University of Denver, and Konsta Helenius, one of the 2024 NHL Draft's top center prospects, had two pro seasons under his belt with Jukurit of Finland's Liiga and was able to play in the AHL immediately.

But, the Flyers ultimately went with Luchanko as the player they thought was the best fit for them, even though they had the least control over his development path between him, Buium, and Helenius.

Now, like last year, the Flyers are stuck deliberating on a near-daily basis whether to play Luchanko or sit him.

The former 13th overall pick had 56 points in 46 games as captain of the Storm last year, but it's not as if he's blowing the doors off, even if Guelph is a bad team. Creating offense and scoring are the obvious concerns with Luchanko, and, in theory, he should be able to spend plenty of time working on that whilst trying to keep the team within reach of winning games.

However, it's clear that the Flyers are averse to this idea and prefer to keep him in-house, even at the inevitable cost of playing time.

Luchanko can and will hold his own, yes, but can the Flyers get him to do more than that? It's the golden question, and one that's hard to answer given his 19 years of age.

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What we can deduce, however, is that the Flyers didn't give themselves the best runway for developing a player by selecting Luchanko over a Helenius, for example.

Of course, Luchanko's assist in the 4-3 shootout win over the New Jersey Devils in the preseason finale came when he was on the ice with Travis Sanheim, who scored the goal, Cam York, Nikita Grebenkin, and Garnet Hathaway.

Hathaway is a fourth-liner, yes, but Luchanko's ceiling is further limited when he's paired with another in Nick Deslauriers or Rodrigo Abols.

With that said, Luchanko playing NHL games with the Flyers can work, but only if and when he plays with players who can help him reach the Flyers' aspirations for his developing scoring touch.