If you thought that Keith Jones and Danny Briere would end the spate of hiring former Flyers… well, you were most definitely wrong. Patrick Sharp even joined the party recently.

If hiring former Flyers is wrong, then the Flyers don’t wanna be right. If hiring former Flyers is a disease, then the Flyers are terminally ill.

They will never stop. They know it riles people. They just don’t care. They chase the high that comes with each new former Flyer brought into the organization in any kind of decision making capacity.

You have to give them a little credit, though. For one thing, they are being rather creative about this. First, they hired Patrick Sharp to help in player development. The subtext of that hiring is hilarious.

“We almost turned this guy into a bust, before we traded him and he became one of the better players on a modern dynasty. So he is going to help us avoid turning players into busts, and trading them away to become key pieces of another team’s dynasty.”

It’s really rather sound logic. Then there’s the even more simplistic logic, but one that holds a kernel of veracity.

“This guy was pretty good at NHL hockey in the not-too-distant past, and he’s a pretty good communicator, so he should help other people be better at NHL hockey.”

I really have heard more ridiculous theories than that. So kudos for managing to hire former Flyers that fit a theme and make some kind of logical sense.

That brings us to our most recent former Flyer hire, who seems to have been brought on in a similar role.

As I say: give them credit. The former Flyers they’re choosing to hire are definitely cooler. They’re getting modernized by a couple decades, which is much needed.

This is, so far, all we know for sure about how the jobs will be divvied up. I’m glad that the one with the most relevant playing experience–the one who has actually played in something close to the modern game–will be the one working with player development. That’s a smart division of labor.

Okay, let’s be serious, now. I’m done ragging on the former Flyers as a bit. I got it out of my system, so let me explain why they’re doing it.

The first thing you have to understand is that these roles are almost invariably given to former players across the league. With rare exception, that is the hiring pool that NHL teams choose to work with. The Flyers decided that, given that pool, they’d also like to find a former player who has a connection to the market. That also isn’t entirely irregular.

What you get is: they limit the pool to former Flyers. But I’m not sure the pool would meaningfully improve if they could hire former Red Wings players, either. So, it truly is what it is.

Besides that, there is something to be said for building a volunteer army. Someone who actually wants to improve the team. Someone who genuinely believes in returning the Flyers to former glory (not in style, but in actual wins)

And not just someone who sees another puzzle to solve, who will promptly slink away to some other mental challenge when a more tempting one comes waltzing by. All of this makes some level of sense.

Do I believe Dan Hilferty when he said there wasn’t any kind of favoritism to former Flyers in the hiring process? No.

But I do think the truth is a bit more complex than “they just look for former Flyers.”

They look in the same places that everyone else looks, which incudes former NHL players. Then they add on two extra qualifications to their search.

— A genuine desire to see the team improve that goes beyond it simply being part of the job.

— A connection to the market in which the team is based. Relationships that predate the job.

It’s gonna be hard to find a candidate for the position with those qualifications that wasn’t a former Flyer in some capacity, and I’m not ready to say those are bad extra qualifications to search for.

There’s something to be said about hiring for experience, but in all honesty, this situation is different from your usual job hunts.

Experience in an NHL front office shouldn’t be valued very highly if your experience is in screwing up everything you touch. Chuck Fletcher had a wealth of experience before he took the Flyers job, and he was terrible.

The problem you run into is that it’s a genuine rarity when someone with unquestionably positive experience is actually available on the market. If they were that good, they’d be working with their old team still.

This makes intuitive sense with players.

Connor Bedard has 0 NHL experience, zero relevant job experience to being an NHL center, and yet everyone wants him over someone like Vincent Trocheck.

Something similar happens with the front-facing jobs in the front office. The promise and hope of something greater generally trumps mediocre job experience.

Professional sports are simply a bit different. The entertainment industry, in general, has always just been a little different.

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