No more room for excuses or failures in the playoffs
PHILADELPHIA >> Fittingly and poetically, the Flyers will open their season Thursday in Las Vegas, the city where there the cards are always turned over and the results are always clear.
If ever there will be a year where their owners and fans find out every necessary answer, this is the one.
Before the season is over, Dave Hakstol will have coached more Flyers games than anyone but Fred Shero. More than Mike Keenan, more than Ken Hitchcock, more than Peter Laviolette, even that season in which he coached all of three games before getting fired.
Before the season is over, Ron Hextall will have been general manager for five years, and will have been in club management for six, plenty of time to draft and ready players, to install a system, and to prove one way or another if he can instigate a near riot at Frankford and Cottman.
Before the season is over, Claude Giroux will be 31, will have played his 12th NHL season, and will have been the captain for seven years.
Before the season is over, there will be no more option to call Ivan Provorov or Travis Konecny inexperienced. Before the season is over, there will be no more option to call Shayne Gostisbehere young. Before the season is over, Jake Voracek and Wayne Simmonds will either become more firmly cemented in Flyers lore, or they will have been revealed as occasional, pop-up All-Stars just good enough to ultimately disappoint.
Though there was some popular dispute about whether the Flyers needed to grow more patient than they ever were during the stewardship of Ed Snider, that’s what happened, and it hasn’t been catastrophic. In his first three seasons, Hakstol twice pushed the Flyers into the playoffs, including last season when they went 42-26 with 14 overtime losses before falling in six first-round games to Pittsburgh.
Until Ed Snider’s 2016 death, and ever since under a more corporate structure, the Flyers have allowed some young players to develop, have allowed a veteran nucleus to marinate, and have given a coach more than two shifts of peace without being made to confront a front-office sort, hands on hips, clearing his throat.
The plan, or better still in the phrasing that makes those raised in the fantasy-league era goosebumpy, The Process, has happened. And on paper, it has happened as designed. It happened without Hextall disrupting the intriguing foundation of Giroux, Simmonds, Voracek and Sean Couturier. It allowed for a proper run-up period for Provorov, Konecny and others to become every definition of major-league. It even yielded a little lottery luck, allowing them to win Nolan Patrick with the No. 2 overall pick in the
2017 draft.
During that time, the Flyers were cautious with a buck, at least by their legendary standards. But when they felt they were close to something, they made a nice free-agent investment of $35 million for five years in James van Riemsdyk. No Flyer last season would match the 36 goals van Riemsdyk scored for Toronto. Patience. Development. Stability.
Luck. Investment.
That was the plan. And that makes this season the moment that so many of their critics wanted and so many of their supporters eventually came to accept. So what is the payout point? What is the acceptable result, all these years later? Before the
76ers made one trainingcamp free throw, Brett Brown announced they were ready to play in the NBA Finals.
Such behavior is anathema to Hakstol, who won’t reveal a line combination
20 minutes before a game, let alone his expectations for June. But given the situation, anything shy of a Brett Brown finish would be enough to declare the years-long culture-change ineffective.
That’s where the bar must be set, this late into the process: Play for the Stanley Cup or start to find some other way to play for the Stanley Cup.
If the Flyers can sneak a glance at one of those betting boards before faceoff Thursday, they’ll learn they are expected to be the sixth-best team in the Eastern Conference. Goaltending, forever their most troublesome spot, is probably the source of the skepticism. But if they can milk 41 healthy games out of Brian Elliott and a few more from Michal Neuvirth, they can be presentable. Maybe by then, Carter Hart is so dominant in Allentown that he will be ready to help.
The addition of van Riemsdyk will give Hakstol enough to man three full-service lines. Couturier with Giroux and Konecny, then Patrick with van Riemsdyk and Voracek can be an entertaining one-two combo. Simmonds, who should be back to himself after a difficult season of body-wide illnesses, can add Line 3 punch.
“Obviously, it’s a process,” van Riemsdyk said in the preseason. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near as complete as we can be. But that is what the preseason is for.”
Every team can envision offensive depth before Game 1 of the regular season. The challenge for the Flyers, who had long stretches last season where they looked like the best team in hockey and other slides where they looked like the Phantoms, is to make that work consistently for 82 nights and a few successful playoff series.
The Flyers were 4-3-1 in a preseason where they were often found ill-arranged in their own end. “We didn’t move the puck well,” grumbled Hakstol, after the final preseason home game, a mess of a 4-2 loss to the Rangers. “It starts in the back end, finding outlets and putting it there. We had sloppy play.”
Even if preseason is preseason, the Flyers’ early inconsistency was troubling for one reason: For what they are built to be, their “preseason” has been unfolding for the last six years.
But that’s why they play regular-season games, including one at 10 o’clock (Philly time) Thursday night on the strip.
“Every outing is important and every outing is added to the body of work,” Hakstol said. “That’s with everybody.”
That is especially true this season, the one where the Flyers will find out whether they’d spent years playing the right hand.