Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Fletcher’s season-ending song sounds like the same sorry tune
VOORHEES, N.J. » The wrong general manager for the wrong time in the wrong city for the wrong franchise made another of his regular sales pitches Tuesday at the Skate Zone. As usual, it wasn’t quite clear what he was selling.
Chuck Fletcher is good at that. He can take a situation and smother it in syllables, grabbing a piece of either side of any hockey discussion, hoping all dissent will sag in the middle. He can promise rebuilding without promising rebuilding, promise to win now but to build for later too, promise to restore the Flyers to their rightful position among the NHL’s royals, but never exactly pinning himself to a timetable.
A few days ago, the Flyers finished their fourth season under Fletcher, and it was a certified pip that featured two coaches, 57 losses and alarmingly vacant Wells Fargo Center sections.
Not that he was any more surprised by any of that than he was a year earlier when the Flyers lost 31 of their 56 games.
“Not necessarily, no,” he said. “There were a lot of different circumstances. Last year was a lot different than this year. This year, there were a lot of different factors involved and we are going to spend the next four to six weeks as we get into our meetings looking at everything.
Clearly injuries were a significant part of things, but I think it goes a little bit deeper than that. We just really struggled this year.”
He needs four to six weeks of meetings to figure out what the Flyers need to do hockey-wise, ignoring the point that whatever it is, it will be his decision. So figure that by the second week of June, he’ll grasp what was obvious, which is that the Flyers are rudderless from the front office down.
By Tuesday, when he shared that Mike Yeo had both the “interim” and the “coach” removed from his title, Fletcher was flailing, unable to say with conviction that he had a plan. Asked directly if he was about to demand a winnow initiative or if building for the future might be his approach, Fletcher didn’t even consent to attempt that open shot.
“A little bit,” he said, “of both.”
Doesn’t work that way, not in practical terms,
not in the eyes of a patron base conditioned to expect the Flyers to always try to win a championship. But even if Fletcher had the courage to say he was ordering a retreat into a rebuild, that would have represented a plan. Instead, he kept flipping out names of young Flyers who were either too injured, too inexperienced or too lousy at the game of ice hockey to have helped much this season, implying that they will come the fall.
Even when he played the injury card — which was his right, given that there was barely an empty chair in the trainers’ room waiting area all season — it didn’t resonate. Rather, he mentioned more than once that the return of Sean Couturier from season-ending back surgery would represent the hockey equivalent of adding a top-line centerman.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get a No. 1 center this summer,” Fletcher said. “Sean is healthy. We believe he is. He’s 30 years old. He’s a pretty good hockey player.”
Couturier is destined for space on one of those franchise Hall of Fame flags dangling from the ceiling. But who knows if that reimagined back will allow him to return to All-Star form? And if it does, didn’t the Flyers have him under contract anyway?
To try to pitch that bringing a player back from injury is the same as adding another centerman is insulting as it is defeatist. Bring back Couturier and find another great player, too. That was the attitude the Flyers projected for decades, the one that was accepted unconditionally by the only customer base in Philadelphia sports history satisfied with the front-office effort regardless of results.
The Flyers are an organization with a history of executive-box decisionmakers and on-ice leaders. With Fletcher rightly trading Claude Giroux at the deadline, the franchise is without a captain, and perhaps without one in the pipeline. OK, Scott Laughton would work. Couturier maybe. Kevin Hayes?
Yet Fletcher apparently has 19-and-a-half more important things to worry about than addressing the need for a uniformed leader with a C on his shirt.
“That’s about No. 20 on our list right now,” he said. “We’ll get into that. My assumption is we’ll get through this summer, get closer to training camp, sit down and make that assessment.”