ITHACA, N.Y. — Senior forward Cole Bardreau has signed a two-year entry-level contract with the National Hockey League's Philadelphia Flyers, the team announced Thursday.
 
Bardreau recently wrapped up a four-year career as the Big Red's spark plug, scoring 18 goals and 35 assists for 53 points over 103 career games. He also emerged as Cornell's leading scorer for the 2014-15 season, scoring five goals — four on the power play — to go with a team-high 17 assists for 22 points. He served as an alternate captain for both the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons.
 
Bardreau also has a reputation as one of the top defensive forwards in ECAC Hockey and was a key component of one of the top team defenses in the country. Cornell led the nation at the end of its regular season with a 91.1 percent success rate on the penalty kill, thanks in large part to Bardreau's ability to win faceoffs in the defensive zone and initiate a quick clear. He had 23 blocked shots on the season, which was tied for the most among the team's forwards, and he won 56 percent of his faceoffs in the 2015 portion of the season. Bardreau won his first All-Ivy League honor last week, when he was selected to the All-Ivy First Team.
 
Bardreau's tenure on East Hill was a rollercoaster. He played in all but one game as a freshman, scoring a memorable overtime power-play goal against Dartmouth in a season marked by a trip the finals of an NCAA regional in Green Bay, Wis. He then served as an assistant captain for the United States in its impressive run to the gold medal at the prestigious International Ice Hockey Federation World Junior Championship in Ufa, Russia, making a name for himself as the center of a line that shut down some of the opposition's most dangerous forward combinations.
 
But after his return to Cornell in January that season, Bardreau suffered a serious injury in which his C-7 vertebra was cracked in two places. He missed the remainder of the 2012-13 campaign, but remarkably came back strong for his two seasons as an upperclassman. As a junior, Bardreau set a career high with seven goals and a plus-6 rating, despite playing in just 26 games.
 
Bardreau is the first undrafted free agent from Cornell to sign an NHL contract since defenseman Brendon Nash in 2010. To date, Cornell has had 28 players go on to play in the NHL and it had seven former players under contract for the 2014-15 season. Bardreau's deal with the Flyers begins in the 2015-16 season.