Slowly but surely the Flyers have been building toward relevancy in the Eastern Conference playoff picture and this season could be a real marked step for them in that direction. For the last six seasons the team has alternated being bounced in the first round of the postseason or missing out completely.

After bringing back James van Riemsdyk on a five-year, $35-million contract in July and with the emergence of young players like Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny and Nolan Patrick, the bar has been raised.

“Quite frankly, we expect to take another step forward,” general manager Ron Hextall told the Courier-Post recently. “We’ve got a lot of young players on our team that can get better. Again, adding JvR and (defenseman) Christian Folin we feel like we’re a better team and now it’s time to stick our nose to the grindstone and take another step.

“I mean, I can say it all I want and our players can say it, but we’ve got to do it.”

Part of why those expectations are so high is because the Flyers have a pretty good idea of what their roster will look like even before camp starts Friday morning at the team’s practice facility in Voorhees. There are, however, a couple question marks. Here are the top three position battles to watch for before the Flyers start for real on Oct. 4 in Las Vegas.

Third line center

The assumption is that Patrick, entering his sophomore season, will hold down the second-line center position where he finished last season. Sean Couturier, still recovering from a knee injury in a charity game last month, will be the team’s top center. He has begun skating again but isn’t likely to suit up for a game until late in the preseason.

With the departure of Valtteri Filppula the Flyers have a hole on their third line and there are several candidates to fill it. The early favorite is Jordan Weal, mostly because Hextall keeps mentioning him as an option. Last season Weal was underwhelming after inking a two-year, $3.5 million contract with only eight goals and 21 points in 69 games. He was a winger during that time but played a few games at center and won only 45.7 percent of his faceoffs.

Weal won’t be alone in the competition. Russian forward Mikhail Vorobyev, an excellent passer and defensively responsible, was a rookie with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms last season. The 21-year-old center played on a line with Oskar Lindblom and Carsen Twarynski in Wednesday night’s rookie game and had a goal and pair of assists in the 6-3 win over the New York Islanders.

Both Jori Lehterä and Scott Laughton will likely get cracks at being the third-line center also, but their body of work is pretty well known after playing the entire season at the NHL level last year. Perhaps the familiarity factor will help their causes with coach Dave Hakstol, but there’s also a chance that the Flyers bring a teenager on their final roster for a third time in as many years.

If 2017 first-round pick Morgan Frost plays well enough he could earn himself an NHL job, but the deck is stacked against him for the most part because he’ll have to be better than the first four candidates who are already professionals. Frost had a huge 112-point season last year with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds and that put him on the map, but the NHL is a different beast. Because of an age restriction with the Canadian Hockey League, the options for Frost are either the NHL or back to junior. He cannot go to the Phantoms in the American Hockey League until he's 20.

Goalie tandem

The Flyers’ wunderkind prospect between the pipes, Carter Hart, will get a lot of action in preseason and that may not necessarily mean he’s close to winning a spot with the team.

Last year’s top goalies, Brian Elliott and Michal Neuvirth, are both recovering from offseason surgery and aren’t expected to play until late in preseason. The team definitely wants Elliott to be the starter — he was one of the lone bright spots when the team went through a dreadful 10-game losing streak last season and he’s taken on a big role with the team’s leadership group — but the door seems to be open behind him.

Neuvirth continues his endless task of trying to stay healthy on a consistent basis and there are others nipping at his heels. Hart, 20 and entering his first professional season, will try to be the youngest goalie to make the Flyers’ roster since Maxime Ouellet played two games as a 19-year-old in 2000. There’s also 2012 draft pick Anthony Stolarz and Alex Lyon, 25, who won four of his seven starts for the Flyers last season.

“I felt like I had a really good training camp last year when I took it one day at a time,” Lyon said. “So that’s gonna be my focus moving forward. I actually have an unbelievable relationship with every goalie here. I think we all kind of view it the same way: that we’re all trying to pull the rope in the same direction and why can’t everybody play really well? It’s a lot of fun and that animosity just detracts, so it’s a good situation.”

Depth defense

With news this week that defenseman Andrew MacDonald will be out six weeks and likely miss the first eight games of the season, a spot opened up on the Flyers’ blueline.

They signed Folin to a one-year, $800,000 contract as the team’s second right-handed defenseman. He is expected to help on the penalty kill and bring some physicality but it’s unclear how much he was going to play before MacDonald’s injury.

“He’s a right-shot, which is important,” Hextall said back in July. “Whether he’s in the lineup or not, who knows? That’s an upgrade there, we feel. Then internally our guys have to get better. That’s the bottom line.”

Folin would have been part of the Flyers’ final group of defensemen (likely to be seven, not eight) anyway, but what remains to be seen is whether he’ll still be No. 7 or if he moves into the top six.

If Philippe Myers were to make the squad, the 21-year-old would be playing and Folin would be in a reserve role. Myers, an undrafted righty who signed a contract with the Flyers three years ago, steadily progressed with the Phantoms last year in his first pro season.

Hextall has also mentioned Moorestown native T.J. Brennan and 2012 fifth-round pick Reece Willcox as candidates for the roster spot.

Dave Isaac; @davegisaac; 856-486-2479; disaac@gannett.com

Up next: at New York Islanders

When: 1 p.m., Sunday

Radio: 97.5 FM