June 24, 2006 was one of the most important days in recent Philadelphia Flyers history, and hardly anyone knew it at the time.
The Flyers owned the No. 22 overall pick of the 2006 NHL Entry Draft, and their odds of landing one of the draft’s top blue-chip prospects — Jonathan Toews, Nicklas Backstrom, or Phil Kessel, to name a few — were slim. As fate would have it, all three of those players wound up being taken back-to-back-to-back in the top five picks, and the Flyers still had a long wait before it was their turn to make a selection.