Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Angst abounds as another long offseason looms for Flyers
One by one, at least a couple of dozen cooked and cracked Flyers rolled into the interview room at the Skate Zone in Voorhees, N.J. throughout Saturday for a brief roasting. Ivan Provorov, who at this stage of his career probably should have had Flyers fans talking deep playoff trips while he moved up the ladder toward a team captaincy, seemed ready.
“No matter what I say,” the still-No.1 Flyers defenseman by default said, “you guys are going to give me your own grades. It doesn’t matter. You’re all experts in hockey, so you’re going to give me your all super experienced grades. I don’t think my opinion matters too much to you guys.”
Ah, let him whine. He’s earned it.
Think it’s easy playing for a Flyers team that from top to bottom has all the makings of an organization in transition? You know, from once proud to simply pathetic?
Yes, there were all kinds of injuries, weird and typical this season. Just as there have been other seasons lamented about all
types of injuries, weird and weirder. People get hurt. It’s the nature of this game.
What isn’t natural is the way CEO Dave Scott and general manager Chuck Fletcher, with the very impactful help of NBC’s accountants, have slowly but surely turned their fans off to this franchise. The Flyers have had bad years and bad stretches before … never have they had the very visible loss of fan support as they’ve had this season. Scott’s reaction? “We’re not happy where we are,” he said. “There’s been frustration, there’s been anger but this is where we sit. It comes down to accountability and we’re all accountable for the success of this team. And that starts with me, the ownership, the front office, the coaching staff and the players.”
That sounds on point. Except that was Scott’s take last April on the Flyers’ 25-win season amid a COVID-delayed, 56-game campaign of 2020-21. For the just completed 82-game season of 2021-22 … they again won 25 games. Injury issues aside, how ridiculous is it that they went from showing “frustration” and “anger” (Scott’s words) over a 25-23-8 non-playoff short season to this 25-46-11 unmitigated disaster?
Over 82 games, they lost 57 times. Note that’s three less losses than the franchise’s all-time worst season, the 22-48-12 Flyers of 2006-07. There were a lot of injuries back then, too. A lot of traded/demoted/ shipped out players, too. Hey, they even fired a great coach (Ken Hitchcock), just like they did when Fletcher dispatched Alain Vigneault last Dec. 6 for no better apparent reason than to cut him a merciful break.
While his team was making one last inglorious stand at Wells Fargo Center Friday night, losing to the almost as lousy Ottawa Senators to finish the season on a three-game losing streak, Fletcher was “celebrating” his 55th birthday.
It’s been 4½ years since then-Flyers president Paul Holmgren and his mentor Bob Clarke helped engineer Ron Hextall’s removal and Fletcher’s installation in the GM’s chair. Since then, he’s dismissed three head coaches and is expected to do the same with still-interim-head-coach Mike Yeo, who didn’t do much wrong and didn’t do much right, and really with this broken down crew, how could he make much of a difference?
For his next move, Fletcher could go for Flyers Hall of Famer Rick Tocchet or some other Phillyconnected move that shows both Clarke and Holmgren still have a lot of pull. Or he could go young and leftfieldish, like Hextall went with Dave Hakstol … and how did that turn out?
But what could be more interesting is how Scott will react to this season. He’s the former Comcast business boss who fully took over as the overseer of the hockey club upon the passing of Ed Snider in 2016. The team’s track record since then (and some years before) isn’t exactly resume-worthy.
Over the last 10 seasons, the Flyers have missed the playoffs six times. Fletcher took over a team in Dec. of 2018 that would make it to the playoffs four months later (one and done, of course), but over his subsequent four full seasons as the hockey boss, the Flyers have missed the playoffs three times.
Hockey GMs don’t get many more chances with a record like that. But Scott’s main advisors are former franchise icons and executives and coaches Clarke, Holmgren and Bill Barber. If Fletcher is still their guy I can’t see Scott making any kind of executive shuffles now.
But time could be running short.
That “worst” Flyers team in 2007 had up and coming players from a Phantoms AHL title team two years earlier, along with an open franchise checkbook ready to purchase Danny Briere’s services, among other necessary niceties. By 2010, they were Stanley Cup finalists.
This crew? It’s hard to tell, since so many injuries meant so many premature trips to the NHL for so many franchise learners. The Claude Giroux trade yielded a guy in Owen Tippett who looks like he could be better than advertised by the critics.
Noah Cates might turn out to be a nice player. Young gun Bobby Brink, too, if rising front office star (and future Fletcher replacement?) Briere can teach him how to get around his size disadvantage. Morgan Frost? Ditto.
Top defensive pick Cam York does have a bright future, and his short-season ending foot fracture coming while trying to block an Alex Ovechkin slapshot gives him some street cred.
As for the veterans, Sean Couturier, who is expected to assume Giroux’s captaincy next year, missed much of this season while needing surgery on his back. Major free agent acquisition Ryan Ellis, the veteran defender with a long contract who was supposed to spark something again in Provorov, played four games. He still can’t explain what’s going on with his injury (injuries?) except to say “we have a plan.”
James van Riemsdyk had an offensive rejuvenation of sorts, and Cam Atkinson had a very good year, considering … and was about as happy about it as Provorov was with his know-nothing writer friends.
Asked Saturday about his team MVP award that he almost sheepishly accepted, Atkinson said, “I don’t know if anyone really deserved that award this year. I didn’t even know those awards were given.”
Despite scoring 23 goals and 50 points in 73 games before he, too, got hurt, Atkinson said, “I guess I’m happy, in a way, (because) there was really no fingerpointing within the locker room, because man, anything that could have gone wrong, went wrong this year. … It’s a pretty crappy feeling being out of the playoffs by January. Every guy’s got to look hard in the mirror and realize we never want to be in this spot again.
“I’m just embarrassed, I guess. It’s a crappy feeling. Almost a waste of a year in my mind, but I hope Chuck is going to do some things in the summer to help this team.”
That is, if he has the chance to do so.