Hextall out as Flyers general manager
Hakstol hanging on as team’s coach for now
VOORHEES, N.J. >> All you had to see was the way the Flyers were so amazingly inconsistent this season. How they could play down to competition, look solid one game and appear to be a complete mess for the next two or three games.
They considered themselves a .500 team but an improving work in progress. In reality they had won 10 of 23 games and were in the process of trending downward again, this in the fourth year of a rebuild with former college coach Dave Hakstol at the helm.
It was clearly time, it seemed. But when general manager Ron Hextall apparently refused to pull the trigger on the head coach, he wound up taking an executive bullet.
Hextall was fired Monday by team president Paul Holmgren, or by Dave Scott, the chairman and CEO of Comcast-Spectacor, the parent company of the Flyers and a hockey team which is now directionless and in a state of chaos. Or by both.
Since a statement under Holmgren’s signature Monday was the only word about the change issued by the club Monday, it was unclear how, why or when it had all unfolded.
“The Flyers organization has decided to relieve Ron Hextall of his duties as Executive Vice President and General Manager,” read the Holmgren statement. “We thank Ron for his many significant contributions, but it has become clear that we no longer share the same philosophical approach concerning the direction of the team. In light of these differences, we feel it’s in the organization’s best interests to make a change, effective immediately. I have
ready begun a process to identify and select our next General Manager, which we hope to complete as soon as possible.”
Holmgren could not be reached for real comment Monday. But he and Scott are scheduled to conduct a media conference Tuesday morning at Wells Fargo Center. It’s anticipated Holmgren will handle both president and general manager duties on an interim basis, but it’s possible he’s further along in his search than what he’s letting on.
Surprise, surprise if Dean Lombardi or Chris Pronger or even smiling Bob Clarke winds up walking out from behind the iron press conference curtain.
The candidates’ list is extensive, but not as large as the head coaching candidates list ... you know, in case the new GM would need one.
It’s interesting since Hextall, the former goaltending icon for the Flyers, tutored in front office politicking under Holmgren until spending several years as an assistant GM in Los Angeles to Lombardi. Hextall returned in 2013 as Holmgren’s “GM in waiting” before he did take over the GM’s chair in May 2014.
“Obviously when somebody gets fired it’s surprising,” Jake Voracek said after a subdued Monday practice at the Skate Zone. “I really don’t know what to say . ... It’s something that the organization thought had to be done and they did it.
“Anything can happen any given day. I don’t know what’s going to be the next step but we can tell that nobody’s safe.”
In his 4½ years at the front office helm, Hextall, 54, is credited with rebuilding a very depleted minor league system. But through Hakstol’s three-plus seasons as head coach since coming from the University of North Dakota, the results haven’t changed much. His teams made the playoffs twice in his first three seasons, both resulting in first-round ousters.
Yet through a few rounds of discontent by fans, criticism in the media and the usual muttered clutter indicative of a head coach in trouble, Hextall stayed true to his hand-picked college coach. You wonder how quickly it will be before that coach has to deal directly with the consequences.
“I’m not looking over my shoulder; I never have, I never do,” Hakstol said. “I focus on the job at hand and going forward. So those are decisions that aren’t up to me. Those would be great questions for you guys tomorrow in the press conference. Those aren’t things for me to speculate on. It’s been made very clear to me what my role and my job is as we get into the near future is. “That’s where my focus is.”
The focus from upstairs has likely been intensely trained on the Flyers’ inconsistent results. The supposition is that the front office headmasters finally considered Hextall’s grand play of bringing in an inexperienced college coach to motivate and instill discipline into a veteran core group while expediting the progress of incoming players to be a failed experiment.
But Hakstol simply seemed to have run out of answers.
His fate seemed close to being sealed last year before the Flyers went on a Western Canada road swing at the end of November and turned it around, starting a sixgame winning streak that seemingly saved his job.
Criticism was at a peak again earlier this month, when with the team reeling he again oversaw a revival on the West Coast, this time winning three out of four through California and Arizona, part of a 5-0-1 run.
But over the past two weeks the Flyers have lost five of six games. The same bad habits were creeping in, and while the club was embarrassing itself with bad losses in Buffalo and Toronto, there were recent high profile dismissals of head coaches Joel Quenneville in Chicago and Todd McLellan in Edmonton, only serving to turn up the heat on the lobbying for a new Flyers savior behind the bench.
It’s just that everyone expected Hextall would be making that move instead of being removed.
“It was a shock for me, definitely,” said Wayne Simmonds, who can trace his development into an NHL player to Hextall’s time in Los Angeles. “I didn’t expect anything of this nature. But hockey is a business. It’s unfortunate that we’ve underperformed as a team. I think as players we have to take that upon our shoulders and we have to right the ship.”
“Anytime stuff like this happens it’s definitely a bit of a shock to the system,” added James van Riemsdyk, who will go down as Hextall’s biggest free agent move. “Obviously we haven’t been as good as we can be as a team.
“When this sort of stuff happens it obviously gets everyone’s attention. This is an organization that has very high standards for itself. When we’re underachieving on the ice stuff like this can happen.”
Hakstol, still the Flyers bench boss as of Monday night, was beyond the average shelf life for NHL head coaches, the most traded commodity outside of the pork belly industry. Moments after hearing the guy that brought him here was gone, he went out onto the ice to prepare his team for its next game, Tuesday night against the Ottawa Senators. How ready for that can they be? “We have to play hockey, we have to win hockey games, that’s our job,” team captain Claude Giroux said. “The business side of it, (Holmgren) and those guys, they’re going to do that. We have to win hockey games, that’s the bottom line.
“I don’t think a lot of guys saw this coming, but like I said, hockey’s a business. As players, we don’t control that.”