Flyers fire embattled GM Fletcher
In a move that most fans would consider overdue, and amid heightened speculation after the trade deadline last Friday, Flyers president and general manager Chuck Fletcher was fired today. He was replaced, at least on an interim basis, by Danny Briere, the team’s longtime star forward who has been prepping in varied front office roles the past three years.
Fletcher, 55, had been hired to replace Ron Hextall in Dec. 2018. Though respected at the time for his organizational rebuild, Hextall had fallen out of favor with other senior members of the organization. At the time, former general managers Bob Clarke and Paul Holmgren, serving as advisors to Comcast-Spectacor chairman Dave Scott, had recommended Fletcher as a replacement.
But Fletcher, who had been credited for overseeing several semi-successful seasons in Minnesota and who had worked with Clarke previously in Florida, could never break the Flyers out of an organizational spin now a decade-long.
Fletcher’s Flyers teams made the playoffs just once, after a 2019-20 season which had been shut down for a while due to the COVID crisis. The playoffs resumed late in the summer, the Flyers beating the Canadiens in the first round before losing to the New York Islanders.
The club promptly fell back into the kind of sagging performances that marked the latter days of the Hextall years. This season will mark the third consecutive Flyers playoff miss. They’ve missed the postseason in four out of the last five years and seven of the past 11.
Prior to missing the playoffs in 2013, the Flyers had only failed to qualify for the postseason once dating to the labor lockout shortened 1994-95 season.
So this stretch of bad Philadelphia hockey certainly isn’t Fletcher’s doing alone, but he will be credited with helping add to the legacy.
“The Philadelphia Flyers organization has always been defined by grit, determination, and
a standard of excellence,” Scott said in a statement announcing the management change Friday. “Over the past several seasons, our team simply has not lived up to that standard, so today, we will begin to chart a new path forward under a new leadership structure for hockey operations.”
Fletcher was heavily criticized at the trade deadline for not being able to deal pending unrestricted free agent James van Riemsdyk, Last weekend, Fletcher reportedly
was loudly booed during a town hall meeting for Flyers season-ticket holders. Whether that moved Scott to finally act isn’t known.
“We are grateful for his hard work and dedication to this organization, and we wish him nothing but the best moving forward,” Scott said of Fletcher in the statement. “Chuck faced significant challenges during his time as president and general manager, including some that were outside of his control, but we have reached a point at which we must move in a different direction and look to the future under new leadership.”
Enter Briere, 45, who played six seasons in Philadelphia,
then a season in both Montreal and Colorado before retiring as a player in 2015. He had helped lead the Flyers to the Stanley Cup finals in 2010, and over 17 playing seasons with several teams, scored 307 goals and 696 points.
He made his way back to the Flyers organization not long after ending his playing career, helping with administrative matters, then in 2017 moving up to run the organization’s minor league team in Maine. He would move on to front office positions with the big club, for the past year serving by Fletcher’s side.
Briere, immediately unavailable for comment, was
said to be making a trip to Pittsburgh. The Flyers, who play the Penguins Saturday, are 24-30-11 this season under first-year coach John Tortorella.
“He is ideally suited for this role, having served as Special Assistant to the General Manager of the Flyers for the past year in addition to his more than 25 years in professional hockey as a player and in management,” Scott said of Briere. “He will ensure a smooth transition following Chuck’s departure and support the team and head coach John Tortorella through the remainder of the season and into the offseason.”
In addition to Briere apparently
auditioning for the general manager’s role — he will oversee hockey matters only, Scott said — more organizational changes could be forthcoming soon. Scott promised a “restructuring (of) our hockey operations department,” first by separating the roles of president and general manager.
Those roles had been separate during the heyday of Clarke’s second general managing tenure in the 1990s prior to him subsequently taking on both roles. Much of the administrative overseeing afterward was shared by former Comcast-Spectacor president Peter Luukko, who was fired and replaced by
… Dave Scott in 2014.
It’s been mostly a southbound cruise for the hockey team since then.
“Flyers fans deserve a better team than what they’ve seen on the ice over the past few seasons, and a clear plan to return this team to Stanley Cup contention,” Scott, who was elevated to replace the late Ed Snider in 2016, reiterated in his statement. “We know that this will be a multi-year process, and we are committed to doing it right, because we want to put this franchise on a path toward winning the Stanley Cup, period.”
Maybe if they just get on a postseason path first?