Hey, Yeo … Flyers have a coach telling it like it is
He’s an interim coach for a hockey club going nowhere, a willing worker, yet one with all the security of a railing in a decrepit Washington football stadium.
He was on the staff of a team that lost 10 games, fired the head coach, and happened to be available. Mike Yeo is a true pro and a hockey lifer, having won 251 career games and taken four teams to the playoffs. But no white-board scribbles or endeavors to orchestrate crisper practices are going to work, not with the Flyers, not as they are constructed.
There is something deeply wrong with Yeo’s team, and it’s not just injuries or failed virus tests.
Yeo probably knew that last year, when he was assisting Alain Vigneault and watching the Flyers meander through a 13-15-6 mini-season. He surely must have thought it as the Flyers stumbled through the early part of this season, costing Vigneault work.
And after watching 11 games as the interim coach, including a disaster of a 6-2 loss Thursday to the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins, Yeo couldn’t hide his feelings any longer.
He might not give the Flyers organization a championship.
Surely, though, he will give it candor.
“For me, the biggest message was, more than anything, that we can talk about X’s and O’s and game plans and everything else,” he said. “It’s just about how hard you fight.”
And there it was: The ultimate hockey insult, wellplaced. The Flyers, their coach let it be known, do not have it within them to fight. More, the remark was perfectly timed, for if ever a coach had a more accessible escape hatch, it would have been Thursday. With Claude Giroux, Ivan Provorov, Travis Sanheim, Travis Konecny, Nick Seeler and Jackson Cates missing due to health and safety protocols, and with Sean Couturier, Nate Thompson and Ryan Ellis injured, the Flyers were pre-approved to sputter against a good Pittsburgh team on a nine-game winning streak.
Yeo easily could have shrugged the four-goal loss off as a cost of 2022 business. But he saw Penguins repeatedly darting behind the Flyers’ defensemen for breakaways. He realized that, other than Cam Atkinson and an improving Oskar Lindblom, the Flyers barely competed at the offensive end. Carter Hart didn’t have much help, but if he is a superstar-elect goaltender, then he should have been better on a night when the Flyers were shorthanded.
Nor was Yeo’s displeasure limited to a night when the Flyers were essentially made to play with a high-grade taxi squad. No, he was irate that in the 16 games the Flyers have been scored on first this season, they have recovered to win … two?
“This is something I’m not looking at just tonight, for sure,” he made certain to clarify. “I believe that there is an element of it where you have to show your determination, your fight and not just to say, ‘It was not our night tonight.’ And you just can’t say, ‘It’s not our season,’ either.
“I think more than anything,” he added, “it’s just mindset and determination.”
That could sound like the wail of an exasperated coach in any sport, a muffled implication that his strategies are fine but that the players must do more to reveal the depth of his genius. Typically, though, that would be a ploy of a coach desperate to hang onto a job. The Flyers, rarely timid about coaching changes, are not likely to trust Vigneaut’s assistant again next year, not unless Yeo somehow mounts a belated Coach of the Year campaign in the second half of the season.
No, he knows his situation. And as long as he is in it, he is going to let it be known that the Flyers have the wrong mix … when they are healthy, when they are not.
“There’s an element of toughness on the ice,” he said. “You show up and you compete and you battle and you play physical. But there’s another form of toughness, and that’s mental toughness, that’s not feeling sorry for yourself and not letting frustration get the best of you.
“Things happen. Bad things happen. What are you going to do? You have to make sure to respond to that. We need to find a way to push harder and not let one goal turn into two and two turn into three.
“We have to show more fight in that situation and we’re going to have a great opportunity to do that going forward.”
The Flyers have 48 games to play. There is a likelihood that their worst virus issues are behind. Maybe they get an injury break or two. There’s time. But they are well into their second season of standing around waiting for on-ice calamity to happen. Somebody had to recognize that. At the right time, an interim coach with little to lose did.