Apr 20, 2026; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Philadelphia Flyers General Manager Danny Briere (left) and President of Hockey Operations Keith Jones (right) after the Flyers defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins in game two of the first round of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs at PPG Paints Arena. Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images
PITTSBURGH -- Danny Briere was walking down the long hall of the press box at PPG Paints Arena about 30 minutes before Game 1. He was walking the opposite direction than most hockey executives would, heading down toward the part of the box where only the media sit.
Normally, executives hang close to their suites, and in most arenas, that's situated close to the broadcasters, occasionally some scouts and other league officials. Many times before a game, you can always catch these hockey folk sipping on a coffee and catching up or sharing some stories before a game.
But it's rare that these executives make their way past the bathrooms - which is kind of a line of demarcation - to walk down toward where the media set up shop on game night.
But there was Briere, walking, seemingly in thought.
He caught the eye of one media member walking back in the other direction.
Briere brightened up, as he always does. He's got the kind of public-facing demeanor that is always polite. He is almost always smiling. It's equally warm and disarming.
"You ready for this," the media person asked?
With a little chuckle he replied, "It's out of my hands now, so I don't have a choice but to be ready."
“I know its going to get dicey, and I know it is going to get wild at times.”
Danny Briere knows how intense Flyers vs Penguins can get #flyers #nhl @RayDunne975 @NHLFlyers @rickybottalico
📸Emilee Chinn/Getty Images pic.twitter.com/GMSt4DvIHj
It's true. It was like the opening night of a play and he is the director. The audience in attendance, for better or for worse, is going to see his finished product. All the hours put in spent rehearsing and preparing to be on the big stage were over. It was time to sink or swim.
And like any director, Briere secretly hoped his hard work would provide the payoff of audience approval and box office success.
That process, once handed off to a coach and players - like the director handing off to a stage manager and actors - is frightening. It makes your stomach do back flips, but it also gets the juices flowing.
And that's when it became apparent. Briere wasn't walking anywhere specific. He was just ... walking.
It was his way of getting in the zone. Of getting ready for the game - the biggest game of his short career as a general manager.
He wasn't pacing a short distance back and forth - that would be like a caged lion waiting for the zookeeper at feeding time - instead it was just clearing his thoughts and getting into the headspace he wanted to be in before his team took the ice.
"When you look at him, he seems like a nice, docile, calm guy," said Brian Boucher, a former teammate of Briere's and currently a color analyst on Flyers television broadcasts and even some national broadcasts of the NHL on TNT. "But I'm telling you, inside, there's a real fire in him. A real competitor. I don't want to call it pride, because sometimes pride can be an ego thing. It can be misunderstood, but I think he's always found a way to punch above his weight, you know?
"Because he wasn't always the biggest guy, right? He had this mentality. I don't want to say underdog, but he had to prove people wrong."
It went back to Briere's days as a player trying to make it in the NHL. He was one of the trailblazers for what the league is now compared to what it used to be.
He was a player who made it in the league despite being much smaller than the hulking players he played with and against. He showed that you didn't need to have both size and skill to be an offensive dynamo in the league, just skill and one other intangible - desire.
On this day 13 years ago, the @NHLFlyers signed Danny Briere (@DannyBriere48). Mr. Playoffs is one of just 30 players in @NHL history to post 30+ PTS in a single postseason (2010). In the 2012 semis v. NJD, he had an OT goal overturned, then did this just two minutes later: pic.twitter.com/1DMhiLy01Q
And that manifested itself when Briere was a player where he would study the players around the league on his own, watching video separate from the video the coaches were sharing at practice.
"As a player, I was focused a lot, especially on goalies and defenseman," Briere said. "I wanted to see how I could take advantage. On off nights, I would watch them specifically. Which guy could I take advantage of when I'm on the ice? Which way can I go when I come up the ice. Which way does he cross over. When he retrieves a puck, what is his tendency? Where does he go most of the time. Those were the things I liked watching. That's how I was going to survive in this league."
Little did he know this kind of study would lead him to where he is today.
"I never saw myself being a G.M.," he said. "So many things have to go right and you have to be in the right place at the right time."
And Briere's path to the role led him to that right place and at the exact right time.
Once his playing career was over, he would start doing some scouting to get a feel for what front offices were looking for, and he excelled at it because he had already been doing it for so long on his own as a player.
Then the roles grew from there. First, learning the ropes about finance from former Flyers CFO Angelo Cardone. Next he would run an ECHL team taking control of the then Comcast Spectacor-managed Maine Mariners, before graduating to the role of assistant to the general manager where he worked under former G..M. Chuck Fletcher.
Under orders from former Comcast Spectacor executives like Dave Scott and Valerie Camillo who disastrously led the Flyers down the wrong path, Fletcher was forced to try and keep a team competitive that had no business trying to stay in that tier.
Instead, after the failings of Fletcher's predecessor as G.M. Ron Hextall with drafting and development, the organization slowly sunk further and further into an abyss as Fletcher couldn't continue to hold the sinking ship together with bubble gum and masking tape.
Enter Briere as part of an inexperienced triumvirate with first time President Keith Jones and first-time sports executive Dan Hilferty as Chairman and CEO.
Many were skeptical that this group would work. There was the whole "former Flyer" narrative with Jones and Briere that was only exacerbated when they hired Rick Tocchet as coach. Combine that with the lack of know how in the job, and, well, there was a belief that this was a Hail Mary hire.
But Briere had a plan. He told his superiors when they hired him that the mess he was being asked to clean up would take between five and six years. .He had to get out from under bad contracts. He had to accrue assets and he had to draft and develop young talent and get the roster on a equal timeline with a trajectory.
He convinced them that the word "rebuild" wasn't a bad one. That it was O.K. to utter it, even though it had never been used in the Flyers lexicon before.
Briere told them he would need a few years for the plan to even begin to bear fruit. That's when he hoped his first draft picks would start to play in the NHL.
Matvei Michkov's arrival a year early changed things slightly, but a coaching change from John Tortorella to Tocchet and a horrible offseason workout regimen by Michkov made it seem like there could be a setback in that timeline.
But ever-savvy, Briere found a way to manage his way around it. Last offseason, he traded for Trevor Zegras and signed Christian Dvorak and Dan Vladar as free agents. Each move was a home run as all three significantly helped the Flyers improve in the standings by 22 points over last season and make an improbable run to the playoffs.
The addition of one of his draft picks - Porter Martone - has also been a difference maker.
When you consider who else has been a big contributor to the Flyers this season, Briere's fingerprints are all over this roster (pun intended).
Denver Barkey, a Briere draft pick, has been a pleasant surprise on the roster, arriving at the NHL level far sooner than expected and helped the Flyers stem the loss of Tyson Foerster to a shoulder injury for four months during the regular season.
While guys like Jamie Drysdale (trade acquisition) and Luke Glendening (waiver acquisition) have already scored goals for the Flyers in two playoff games, guys who were part of trades that didn't happen have been stalwarts.
Briere almost traded Travis Sanheim to St. Louis two summers ago and held off on trading Rasmus Ristolainen at the trade deadline last month.
The top pair is now logging 25 minutes a night in playoff wins, with Sanheim scoring a goal and Ristolainen chipping in a pair of assists in the first two playoff games.
"I wasn't trying to dump Risto." 👀
Flyers GM Danny Briere explains why the Flyers didn't trade Rasmus Ristolainen at the deadline. pic.twitter.com/64jHOMrpBW
"The one thing that stands out to me that I find remarkable is the amount of restraint that you need to show and patience you need to show when, as a competitive guy, you probably want to pull the string on something. Sometimes the best moves are the ones you don't make," Boucher said. "I think [Briere] has showed very good patience in certain cases but at the same time was proactive, like with the (Ivan) Provorov trade and moving off other guys (like Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost). He's done some things to show off how smart he is, but you can also see the competitiveness coming out now, because he wants his guys, the guys he's picked for the team, to come out and win."
Which is why it's probably apropos that Briere's team is also punching above it's weight now, with a 2-0 lead on the Pittsburgh Penguins and an expected raucous crowd awaiting them Wednesday night for Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, the first playoff game in front of fans in more than eight years.
As good a player as Briere was in the regular season, his nickname was Mr. Playoffs. He even wrote a book (in French) where that was the title. At this time of year, he had an innate ability to ramp it up another level, and now, a team he is building in his image is doing the same - much earlier than anyone would have expected, including Briere.
And he's perfectly fine with that, even if he has to just watch his creation succeed or fail on it's own without any further input from him.
"It's totally different," he said with his trademark grin. "As a player, you're nervous leading into the game, but as soon as you hit the ice, that nervousness goes away and the focus becomes the game. I used to tell myself that the game was waiting for me to make it happen. That was my approach. I always believed I was going to make a difference.
"Now, it's the opposite. I'm pretty calm leading up to the game but when the game starts, that's when the nerves kick in and you are asking yourself, 'how do you keep sane?'"
Brier said he knows the cameras are always on, so he tries to manage the emotions as best he can. He said he takes notes to during the game to keep himself busy. He said he and Jones use each other as a sounding board like two friends at a bar watching a game. He tries to find different ways to control the emotions, again, because there have been a lot of doubters.
But Briere and his team are proving the naysayers wrong, and now, maybe, just maybe he can prove that he can be Mr. Playoffs as a G.M. too.
He laughed at the suggestion. He didn't want to take the bait. But he did want to give his players their due.
"I'm so proud of these guys for doing what they did to take this team to these playoff games," he said. "I'm trying to enjoy that part of it as much as possible."
And when he sees the crowd on Wednesday night he'll know practically everyone else in town feels the same way.
