Jack Murtagh landed at No. 20 in the Flyers’ 2026 Top 25 Under 25 after a freshman season at Boston University that didn’t match the scoring expectations that came with him.
The 2025 second-round pick spent 2025-26 with BU and finished with 6 goals and 5 assists in 35 games. He was 19 years old as of 9/15/2026, having been born 8/22/2007, and the Flyers selected him in the 2025 NHL Draft with the 40th pick in the second round.
Coming out of the US National Team Development Program, Murtagh was supposed to bring some of that scoring touch with him to the NCAA level. Instead, his first year with the Terriers turned into a frustrating one on the scoresheet. Eleven points in a freshman season isn’t nothing, but it also wasn’t the kind of jump Philadelphia was probably hoping for.
BU’s season didn’t do him many favors, either. The Terriers had a lineup packed with offensive talent, including Tynan Lawrence, Sacha Boisvert, Conrad Fondrk, Ryder Ritchie, and Cole Eiserman, and they also had major pieces on defense in Sascha Boumedienne, Charlie Tretheway, and Cole Hutson.
But the production never really came together as a team. BU scored only 2.9 goals per game, sat in the bottom half of the NCAA in most offensive categories, and finished with the 50th-ranked power play out of 63 teams in college hockey.
That context matters because Murtagh’s game was never just about points. At the USNTDP, he built a reputation as a hard-nosed, straight-line skater with an insane motor, and a lot of that showed up again at BU.
He was the kind of player who hounded pucks, forced takeaways, and made life easier for his teammates by doing the dirty work on the forecheck. He wasn’t able to overwhelm college players physically the way he did in the NTDP, but he kept trying to play that way.
As he gets bigger and older, there’s a belief he could become more effective at finishing hits and pushing the issue.
The calling card has always been the shot. That part still looks real.
Murtagh didn’t get to use it as often as he would have liked this season, but the tool remains obvious: he can score from distance, his release is deceptive, and when he gets it off cleanly, he can really rip it. If everything breaks right, there’s a shoot-first, energy-driven bottom-six winger in there.
That uncertainty is part of the story with Murtagh, too. Flyers assistant GM Brent Flahr said in a September 2025 interview with PHLY that the organization wasn’t entirely sure what archetype he fit into.
At the USNTDP, Murtagh was asked to do a little bit of everything - drive offense, play net-front, and lean into a pure shoot-first mindset. After one NCAA season, he still hasn’t been boxed into one lane.
That may not be a bad thing. Right now, Murtagh is still in the discovery stage as a prospect.
If his scoring stays where it was or only inches up, his forechecking and physicality will likely become even more central to his profile. And if his college numbers don’t explode, that still may not tell the full story if his eventual NHL ceiling is in a bottom-six role.
There’s also room for a bigger offensive leap. If Murtagh earns more ice time and moves higher in the Terriers’ lineup, maybe there’s more skill waiting to be unlocked.
Either way, he’s the kind of player who stays involved every shift. For a low-scoring NCAA prospect, that’s not nothing.
In the Flyers’ system, Murtagh now projects more as a winger than a center, even though he did spend some time down the middle with the USNTDP. Philadelphia already has plenty of winger talent in the organization, especially at the NHL level, but the next wave will eventually need affordable young players to round out the roster. With Matvei Michkov, Porter Martone, and other higher-end players eventually needing to be paid, the Flyers will be looking for cheap depth on entry-level deals, and Murtagh could fit that lane if his development keeps moving forward.
He sits in the same general prospect tier as Cole Knuble, Matthew Gard, and Max Westergard.
The upside here looks like a bottom-six NHL role, though one with enough versatility to move up and down the lineup when needed. His forechecking and shot could make him usable higher up in a pinch, but the cleanest projection is as a depth piece on a contender.
The best version of Murtagh is a player nobody enjoys facing and one coaches trust. If the offense ticks up a bit and the rest of his game holds, that kind of future is still very much on the table.
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