After the disastrous 2020-21 campaign, all the promises and quotes that came from the front office about changes and accountability and how their hairs were turning grey, it seemed almost impossible for the 2021-22 season to be any worse. It was a season where their defense got victimized to a tune of 9-goal games on national television, their offense went completely quiet in the most critical juncture of the season, their special teams play was horrendous, and their goaltending finished dead last in most categories. The wheels were in motion, things were changing, the tune in Philadelphia had changed overnight, and several media members and sources were jumping on the Flyers playoff bandwagon; did Chuck Fletcher finally solve the Flyers conundrum? Short answer, no. Long answer, also no.
A lot of what happened last year was swept under the rug because of the shortened season. Losses, losing streaks, and not qualifying for the playoffs can happen in a snap second when you’re only playing 56 games in quick succession and against the same seven teams. It also helped the Flyers’ brass that the team was looking good heading into the month of March. The wheels fell off with two months remaining and with the trade deadline fast approaching, it helped the Flyers unload their problems. This season has been incredibly different for a variety of reasons, but none larger than the fact that the 82-game campaign returned. It is incredibly difficult to hide when you have to play seven full months of hockey and it’s even harder to hide when your season ultimately ended in January. You could make the argument that the season was done during and after their first 10-game losing streak but why not double down and lose 10+ times once more to really punctuate the season.
Excuses are the name of the game and they are rung up even more when you’re a disaster on skates. COVID was more of an issue last year with the pandemic causing players to miss plenty of games, having teams postpone their games due to having too many players sidelined, and no fans in the stands for most of the season could’ve played its part as well. Injuries, COVID, and attendance were excuses used by the Flyers several times and even though some of it was warranted, every other team had to deal with the same issues, some more so than others. Talent and skill is what Philadelphia is lacking and as simple as it sounds and as simple as it may seem to fix that issue, the Flyers brass keeps looking in a different direction, one that will lead them nowhere but into obscurity and into oblivion.
Acquiring Ryan Ellis, Cam Atkinson, and Rasmus Ristolainen looked decent on paper, maybe even good, however it’s been speculated to death that Chuck Fletcher was made aware of Ellis’ situation before the trade was completed, Cam Atkinson has done a good enough job with the team he had around him this year, and Rasmus Ristolainen was a severe overpayment that the Flyers then doubled down on and extended for five years instead of recouping assets at the trade deadline, where teams severely overpay for rentals. Add in Keith Yandle, who is currently -41, hasn’t been a factor on the power play even though that is his sole asset to a hockey team, and any pairing he’s been on has been victimized to no end on a nightly basis. Martin Jones didn’t have the resurrection season the Flyers were hoping he’d have when they reunited him with Kim Dillabaugh, Derick Brassard was injured so many times you’d forget he was on the roster, and the Flyers lost Nate Thompson to a shoulder injury so early in the season that bringing him back in the fold made no sense in April.
The moves made sense to a degree as well because Nolan Patrick was disgruntled and Phil Myers was in Alain Vigneault’s doghouse, so getting a perceived number one defenseman for two pieces that were no longer apart of your present or future seemed like a win-win. Shayne Gostisbehere had clashed with the coaching staff to a point where his future was written on the wall, but the Flyers mismanaged that trade asset by waiving him last season and signaled that they will do whatever it takes to get his contract off the books. In doing so, they had to throw in a second round pick as well as a seventh rounder in what resulted in a cap-dump to Arizona. Jakub Voracek was a Flyer for a decade and if change was to occur then it had to be either him or Claude Giroux, and one of them had a no-movement clause while the other didn’t. It was a puzzling decision to bring back the same coaching staff with such a radically and changed lineup, only because the sins of the past remained with the three-headed coaching staff that wasn’t able to push the needle outside of a very successful two months in the early stages of 2020.
Most general managers add to the mix of players they already have and assemble a team so lethal and so deep that they can be considered elite or at the very least a playoff contender. The Flyers can’t use that formula because they love trading an eye for an eye but also because they have so much money tied up to players with little trade value and who have underperformed. The core of the Flyers as it stands has Kevin Hayes, Sean Couturier, Ryan Ellis, Travis Konecny, Ivan Provorov, and Cam Atkinson making a combined $39.27 million, which is roughly 48 percent of the cap. Add in Joel Farabee and Rasmus Ristolainen and your core has reached $49.37 million, which is around 60% of the newly inflated $82.5 million salary cap. Within that group you maybe have a number one defenseman in Ellis, but who knows what the next steps are in his rehab as the Flyers remain mum about his injury altogether. You have maybe a number one centre in Sean Couturier but he’d be at the low end of that spectrum and then the rest are middle of the pack or on the trading block. Not necessarily a “core” to write home about.
As Elliotte Friedman so eloquently stated, the Rasmus Ristolainen extension was the first domino to fall in what would be a “re-modelling” of the defense in the offseason. Now that there are question marks surrounding the status of Ryan Ellis for next season that re-model has to be put on hold because if you trade Provorov and/or Sanheim and Ellis is supposed to miss more time, then your defense has Ristolainen at or near the top of the list. The Flyers also only have around $8 million in open cap with restricted free agents like Owen Tippett, Morgan Frost, Tanner Laczynski, and Zack MacEwen looking for new deals. They won’t break the bank but surely they will compete for a sizeable chunk of the measly $8 million leftover. Even if you traded James van Riemsdyk’s final year while attaching a draft pick, you have $15 million to drastically revamp a roster that has so many holes to fix.
Rather than trading your biggest trade chip for a big haul, the Flyers decided to extend him for five more years. You can have the Ristolainen argument all you want, good or bad, but it was not what the Flyers needed. They knew that Claude Giroux only wanted Florida, it was reported after the trade was finalized that the Panthers were always his number one choice and that the other teams didn’t really stand a chance. We had no clue that this was the case, so the idea of him going to Colorado or Minnesota or St. Louis or Boston was tantalizing because that meant a bidding war would ensue. The aforementioned teams submitted their offers regardless but it was moot due to Giroux’s no-movement clause. So if Fletcher was made aware of Giroux’s desires, he then knew Ristolainen was his biggest trade chip. With the Florida Panthers trading a first round pick, a fourth round pick, and a prospect for Ben Chiarot, the Flyers would’ve made out like gangbusters if they were open to the idea of trading Ristolainen.
A physical, right-hand shooting, offensively capable defenseman on retained salary who was chomping at the bits for playoff hockey, while also having several suitors at the NHL Draft before the Flyers swooped in with the better trade offer; just spells out win-win for the Flyers. Instead, they extended him in what could be seen as the first move of the third re-tool. Right before the trade deadline, the Flyers gave him more ice time, put him on the power play, and even announced to the entire league on national television that they were going to make him the net-front presence on their power play. All these moves seemed like a way to boost his trade value before the deadline but once he signed his contract extension, they pulled him off the power play, he became less physical, he was victimized a lot more, and you no longer heard about him until his injury. What was the motive behind all that?
Whatever the plan is for the summer, I can say from past experience, it most likely won’t work. The Flyers don’t want to go through another rebuild, especially when they were not necessarily open to the idea of the first rebuild. It was one of those things where they knew change had to happen, they knew Paul Holmgren could no longer be their general manager, but more importantly they knew other teams were trying to recruit Ron Hextall. He was a stubborn man, a man stuck in his ways, but he convinced a management group that has been so against rebuilding, to give him 4-5 years to work his magic and stack the pipeline with the future of the franchise. For lack of a better word, the rebuild did not work. Many prospects never made it to the big leagues and even the ones that did never made much of a name for themselves. As for the show-stopping names like Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, Travis Sanheim, Carter Hart, and Morgan Frost, the jury is still out on them with another disappointing season in the books. It’s gotten so bad that Provorov and Konecny might even have a foot out of the door as we speak with Fletcher diligently working the phones for trades to be completed in the summer.
Re-tooling didn’t work for Bobby Clarke, it didn’t work for Paul Holmgren, and it certainly hasn’t worked for Chuck Fletcher. You can make the argument that making the playoffs on game 82 in 2010 might’ve been the biggest mistake in franchise history, or at the very least in recent memory. If the Flyers hadn’t won that game, Paul Holmgren was on a very hot seat, one that he might not have survived especially with Ed Snider being very impatient when it came to losing. Trading Mike Richards and Jeff Carter might’ve never happened with a new general manager in charge and instead of building around them, they booted both cornerstones and tried building around Chris Pronger, who fell to an untimely career-ending injury. Once he fell to his injury they then tried fixing the problem with patchwork moves that resulted in Holmgren “losing” his job after several unsuccessful seasons. The Flyers have reverted back to their old ways when they brought Fletcher into the fold and with his third re-tool in four years about to come to fruition, I beg to ask the question of when will enough be enough?
The fanbase has been patient, we’ve gone through the lean years of Holmgren when he signed everyone to stratospheric contracts and hampered their abilities to improve via trades, the draft, or free agency. We’ve gone through the rebuilding phase of Hextall, where we patiently waited out his master plan of stocking up with draft capital and hoarding them no matter what other teams were offering. Now we’re going through the roughest patch of them all with what seems like no present, no future, and a very distant past that seemed like things were turning a corner, whether you want to use 2017-18 or 2019-20 as an example. No one trade, no one free agent signing, no one coaching hire, no one draft is going to change the trajectory of this team.
The Flyers are in such a rut right now that they need several years to clean up the mess, rebuild from within, and start anew with a different vision, voice, and culture. They need to embrace another Hextall-esque rebuild, but this time to go full throttle instead of holding onto some valuable assets in the hopes of squeezing a playoff spot. The sad reality is that it’s not going to happen this summer and that we have to go through another re-tool in the hopes that somehow Fletcher taps just the right buttons to fix this mess. Is it possible? Sure, I guess technically anything is possible, but is it a realistic outcome? All I’ll say is that history is a guide to navigation in perilous times and the Flyers should be wise to open their history books and beef up on their dastardly fall from grace and how to avoid continuous and similar issues in the present and very-near future.
Fan attendance has dropped dramatically as they have only been able to average 16,461 per home game this season. Those numbers represent the amount of tickets sold because it’s very obvious that 84.3% of the Wells Fargo Center is not present during every home game. The real number is probably closer to 10-12,000 and even that might seem like a stretch with how empty the arena has been over the last several months. Season ticket holders haven’t renewed at the same pace as before, ticket prices have dropped, fans have shown their distaste and disdain all over social media this season, and it’s very apparent that the thin line the Flyers were treading for so many years has finally been crossed.
The Flyers no longer hold the same lore within a city that have very popular NFL, NBA, and MLB teams, not to mention a very successful MLS team in recent years. What was once a top four franchise in Philadelphia sports has now become a top five because the Union have jumped ahead of the Flyers. A once venerated and celebrated team has now become a laughingstock and a rebuild should be nothing to be ashamed about. It’s a common trend in sports, it’s something that is extremely necessary and prevalent, and no team is safe from the clutches of a rebuild.
