Flyers showing why it’s good to make postseason
High among the subliminal messages at Sam Hinkie was able poison a generation of Sixers fans with was that there was no more dirty a basketball achievement than to simply participate in the NBA playoffs.
To him, and to his brainwashed followers, the concept of competing after regularly scheduled Game 82 was but an inconvenience for any team not unanimously deemed capable of winning 16 more times in the spring. For that, he would surrender his personal pride and his professional dignity and ask coaches, players, ownership and the customers to join him in an eternal vigil to build a team so spectacular that it essentially could be presented with a championship trophy by acclimation. Many did. On-court catastrophe ensued.
As with any such scheme, there is never really an end game. There is just more scheme. So there was Hinkie recently quitting as the Sixers’ general manager and winning not basketball games, but winning reputation protection. For if the Sixers were to soon build a championship team, he could claim it was on his artistically constructed foundation; if not, it was because they didn’t have the patience to beg him to keep the process rolling.
So, no, he never did produce a winner. But he avoided all of that useless nonsense called the NBA tournament, where 16 teams enter and 15 misguided teams do not survive.
The fans deserved better.
The fans deserved what the Flyers have been giving their fans.
With just as wide an option to sneak behind the 21st century failurerationalizations of culture change, rebuilding or incremental improvement through analytics, the Flyers instead chose to compete. While they won seven of their first 22 regular-season games, and while their own general manager was warning them not to expect any trade-deadline help, the Flyers grew under a firstyear coach, played better after that silent deadline and worked their way into the final Eastern Conference playoff spot for a first-round series against the Washington Capitals, the NHL’s best regularseason team.
That was five games ago, three of them losses. Already short a scorer or two, the Flyers lost important, two-way forward Sean Couturier to an early-series injury. They still need to win twice, beginning Sunday, to advance.
But to have watched the series, to have watched that season, to have seen it all, to have appreciated most of it, has been to understand: There is nothing damaging that can come out of an honest professional effort.
Though the Flyers may not win the Stanley Cup, this is what they have won already in a couple of April weeks of bonus hockey:
• They have won a chance for Shayne Gostisbehere, a superstar defenseman in the making, to experience the NHL postseason, with its added speed and intensity, making him even more likely to sparkle the next time he is in the playoffs.
• They have won Dave Hakstol a chance to be staggered at first, then to concoct significant, in-series changes to his lines, to his penalty-killing scheme, to his goaltending. The Stanley Cup playoffs are different from the one-or-done NCAA tournaments he’d experienced at the University of North Dakota. But Hakstol already has used the postseason to become a more seasoned NHL head coach.
• They have won a chance to stare-down elimination after being smothered by five goals in Game 3, winning Game 4 not because Washington had a game to lose, but by surviving a furious thirdperiod Capitals flurry, then by winning Game 5, on the road.
“I knew,” Hakstol said, “this was a resilient group.”
He has found it out, at least.
• They have won the chance to give their fans a show, banging around, engaging in a few fights. Even if some of those fans went all “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and began throwing props toward the players in Game 3, there was a value in generating such passion.
• They have won information about some of their players. They have seen that it is better to have Radko Gudas, who will take the occasional bad penalty, on their side than on the other. At the same time, they should have learned that Steve Mason is not their long-term answer in net.
• If not in the playoffs themselves, but in the necessary run toward them, they have found that Wayne Simmonds, Claude Giroux and Brayden Schenn are nicely in their career primes and can remain as a useful nucleus.
• Mostly, they won the right to play. They haven’t always played well. But they’ve played. They played in a tournament for which many believed them to be unqualified. And for that, unlike the basketball team across the Wells Fargo Center hall, they have won dignity.
“That’s the way it’s been all year for us,” Simmonds said, after the Flyers won Game 4, avoiding elimination. “It seems like no one has ever given us a chance. We just keep fighting back and get ready to continue.”
Who knows where the Flyers, any of the Flyers, by the 2017 playoffs? But their system is known to be deep in young defenseman. Their key players are not too old to continue to improve. Hakstol, who won a Coach of the Year candidacy if not necessarily the accompanying plaque, will be better for the go-around.
“I don’t think it’s anything we didn’t expect,” Hakstol said, as the Flyers have avoided elimination. “We expected to come out and battle hard.”
It may never translate to a championship. But it has translated into pride and enjoyment and adrenaline and growth.
That’s not wrong. That’s never wrong. And to expect anything else from a professional sports team is just an empty scheme.