Flyers’ Dr. Hextall not ready for major surgery

PHILADELPHIA >> While admitting in a Monday interview that he’s not a doctor, not in his head (upper-body) or his gut (lower-body), Ron Hextall nevertheless felt free to offer a diagnosis of his hockey players. The conclusion? Ah, fair to middling. “Every year is new for every player,” the Flyers general manager said during a team practice at Wells Fargo Center. “Some guys have career years, some guys have a bit of off years. We have some guys who are having what you would call off years. Certainly, production wise.”

That would be a fairto-middling assessment, considering no Flyers are among league leaders in major statistical categories. Not that they’re completely in absentia, since Claude Giroux is tied with Washington’s Nick Backstrom and Pittsburgh’s Phil Kessel with a league-leading 28 power play points, and Wayne Simmonds’ 29 goals overall are nothing to sneeze at.

But Giroux’s 14 goals and 51 points is significantly off his usual level, and will represent the fifth consecutive season that his points-pergame ratio will trend downward. He admitted this week that offseason labrum-hip surgery set him back, and indicated that only now he is at a point where he’s feeling completely like his old self.

This despite Hextall contending all season long that Giroux was fine.

“The player knows how the player feels,” said Hextall, a reference to Giroux’s earlier proclamations that he was healthy. “The player’s truly the only one that can say whether he’s had issues with that or not. I can’t answer that question. I know a lot of the research (on labrum surgeries) says no.

“Medicine moves quick and I’m not a doctor. I don’t have those answers, quite frankly. I know G’s playing real well right now. He looks very dialed in.”

Therefore, Hextall said he has no problems with the team-paid doctors dealing with Giroux and Shayne Gostisbehere, who essentially had the same surgery and also was far off the level he flashed as a rookie. But perhaps those medical people aren’t completely off the hook.

“I’ll ask questions,” Hextall said. “I ask a lot of questions about everything within the organization. You always ask questions.”

As for other queries about the Flyers’ offensive issues, Jake Voracek has picked up his scoring pace, already tying his 2015-16 total of 55 points. But he finished last season at a negative-5 in plus-minus rating. Right now, Voracek is at a careerugly minus-26.

He’s not alone: Gostisbehere is minus-25, Brayden Schenn is minus-22, Simmonds minus-21 and Giroux a minus-18.

Sure, that stat is known throughout the hockey world as the most misleading stat of them all. But when is the last time you saw a good team’s best players have such double-digit minuses?

If Hextall held any kind of doctorial aspirations, he probably should start pondering surgery on his team’s defensive posture, starting with the forwards and progressing down.

Which brings us to the team’s professed and acclaimed best defensive forward, Sean Couturier. He made news on this interview day only because he’d played so well Sunday night in a 4-3 overtime victory over the Carolina Hurricanes, a game in which the ‘Canes were less than a minute away from winning in regulation and really sending the Flyers’ slim playoff hopes spiraling down.

“Yeah, I thought Coots played a terrific game last night,” Hextall said. “He was playing the way he’s capable of playing. It was one of those moments where you go, ‘That’s it.’”

There haven’t been too many of those moments for Couturier, who has 11 goals and 26 points. But at least he’s a plus-3.

Asked if he sometimes thinks Couturier should contribute more offensively, Hextall said, “I think at times. At other times, no. But again, we are where we are now. Hopefully Coots builds on last night and gives us some real good efforts down the stretch.”

If that answer sounds rather political, well, like his denial of his inner-physician, Hextall isn’t one to manage with any kind of agenda, even though he’s overseeing a Flyers rebuild. Not that he calls it that.

“When it’s time to make that one last move, you’ve got to make a big move to fill that one hole,” Hextall said. “But when you’re in the spot where we’re at, the last couple of years we’ve been building assets and now our assets are starting to show up on our team. So there’s going to become a point here where there is going to be a little bit more of a focus on final pieces.

“Right now we’re in a growth period. We’re getting younger, getting better ... in a growth period. So me being impatient right now would not be a good thing. We’re in a cap world. There’s 30 teams. There’s not a lot of players sitting out there that are going to come in at a low number. That’s the game today and that is why I believe in building an organization through the draft and development.”

Hextall has indeed shown patience through this rebuild when it comes to signings. But then there were those three curious free agency decisions last summer that yielded Dale Weise and his four-year contract, along with Roman Lyubimov and the since-demoted Boyd Gordon.

Weise has scored twice in the last three games and still those three free agent forwards have a combined nine goals on the season for the Flyers.

“He is certainly a better player than he has shown over the course of the year,” Hextall said of Weise. “At the time, we added depth to our lineup. We expect 12 to 15 goals and he is nowhere near that. So, in a nutshell, we know Dale can play better.”

Whether he’s playing doctor, being a somewhat honest hockey politician or just doing his job, Hextall could extend that thought to all of his players, his coaching staff and to himself.

“At the end of the year, I’ll sit down and look at everybody, including myself,” Hextall said. “If I’m not evaluating myself, I’m not doing a very good job.”

••• The Flyers have embarked on a four-game road trip that begins tomorrow night in Winnipeg and then cuts through daunting stops in Minnesota, Columbus and Pittsburgh. The Flyers have lost 16 of 19 road games dating to a loss Dec. 17 in Dallas, which ended their overall 10-game winning streak. Said Voracek: “It’s a tough road trip. Every game for us is do or die, so ... I know we weren’t good on the road lately, but we have to be good on the trip coming up. We have to be good. We have no choice.”