Flyers

Flyers Notebook: Current thoughts on Tyson Foerster and Owen Tippett

I wasn’t entirely sure what to write, because I had a few thoughts regarding the Flyers bouncing around in my head.

I decided to lean into that and write something that tackles two simultaneous thoughts I’ve been having in one piece. It’s based on in-game observations without bothering to hunt down many clips to illustrate my point.

This is something of an “emptying the notebook” piece for me. If you like it, let me know! Without further ado:

Tyson Foerster

Well, it happened. I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t happen, even with the voodoo that is my well-established powers of reverse jinxes on Twitter. The scoring has arrived. With 9 goals in his last 9 games, it feels safe to say that.

For me, the shit-talking was 50% gimmick and 50% cold reality. The Flyers, much to John Tortorella’s chagrin, did not need another Noah Cates. They didn’t need another guy with stellar defensive impact who has such little scoring touch that it wasn’t worthwhile to play him in the top 6 of a championship-contending team.

That’s not an insult to Noah Cates, who is a useful player. It’s just a simple truth that you only need so many of these guys on the team. But this run of play is enough to say that Foerster isn’t that.

Now, you can see the exciting ceiling that people mostly just assumed was there. I was a bit more wary than most. It’s a peculiar development path that Foerster is taking. Generally, flashes of offensive brilliance are the first thing you see because that’s what happens naturally. The defensive acumen comes later with top-6 mainstays more often than not.

Tyson Foerster has taken the opposite path, which was so odd to me that I struggled to believe in it. But my belief was unnecessary. Tyson has made it work.

For a short while before this, the goals would come once in a while. He would score, and the world would wonder if this was when the floodgates were going to open. They would be proven wrong as he went another five games pointless. There just wasn’t a sustained run. Moreover, there wasn’t a goal scorer’s hot streak.

The thing about goal scoring is that consistency is a myth. Even for the elite guys, it doesn’t exist. It’s far too difficult of a thing to just consistently score goals at the same rate. It’s much more akin to a batting average in baseball.

A .300 hitter often comes to that number by hitting .220 for a few weeks, then going on a tear and hitting .450 for the next few weeks. The cycle continues on and on, and eventually, the average becomes a way of describing who he is when you balance both the hot and cold spells.

The concern for Foerster and his lack of scoring wasn’t the cold spells. Those are natural. It was the total absence of hot streaks. Well, former absence.

A goal per game for any prolonged amount of time is a hot streak that would make Auston Matthews proud. Will it last? Probably not much longer, no. It’s the simple nature of things.

He’ll probably go cold again soon. Again, it’s the nature of things. But we’re starting to get an idea of who Tyson Foerster is as a goal scorer at this stage between his run last year and his tumultuous season this year.

His shots on goal thus far have come out to approximately 2.15 per game in his short career. He’s converting on 13.6% of those to date. In an 82-game season, that’s 176 shots and about 24 goals in a season.

A lot of people point to Mark Stone, because of his largely deficient skating and his defensive acumen as a good example of his upside. I can see what they mean in a general sense.

I’ve always preferred the Jason Robertson comp in terms of ultimate upside. Like Foerster, he’s a goal scorer at heart. Robertson also wasn’t supposed to be this much of a possession monster. To this day, he doesn’t get full credit for it. But he’s been consistently dominant in this regard.

He’s more of a power-and-finesse guy who loves to score goals. Stone is a heavy, bruising wall player who also happens to be one of the elite playmakers in the NHL. I see Tyson in more of the Robertson vein.

The comparison, for this moment, is what you’d expect. A no-contest in favor of Jason Robertson. He has more of an impact on the team’s chances created and suppressed, and he’s more active with the puck. He’s just better to some degree in nearly every regard. None of this should be surprising, of course.

But remember when I talked about Foerster being a true-talent 24-goal scorer at this stage of his career? At a similar stage, his rookie year, Jason Robertson paced for 27 goals. The two had their rookie campaign at similar ages, too, though Robo is a few months younger.

I wonder if the gap in puck activity (as measured by those micro-states) would be mitigated if Foerster had to take charge of the puck more in his minutes early in the season. At one time, his linemates for half of the year were Sean Couturier and Travis Konecny. TK is one of the most insanely puck-dominant players in the NHL at 5on5.

Robertson is merely in the 35th percentile for shots off high-danger passes, and Foerster is in the 85th percentile.

You could use this to condemn Foerster’s finishing ability, but I’m not going to do that. It looks to me like Foerster is much more of an on-stick shooter. He likes to shoot when the puck has been on his stick for a few seconds before the shot ultimately comes.

It’s a tough way to make a living as a top-tier goal scorer. Jason Robertson and Auston Matthews are two of the premiere examples. Connor Bedard is quickly rising to those ranks. You don’t get to fire on goaltenders who haven’t quite gotten square to you because they were busy dealing with pre-shot movement.

But if you have a good eye for when a screen is in place, as well as the holes a goalie can leave even when they appear to be set, you can make it work. Foerster seems to have an eye for both of those things.

He spoke after the game about actually anticipating Farabee’s screen rather than looking for it while he corralled that bouncing puck. If he was anticipating a screen, then he’d understand that Sogaard was going to shrink down to see the puck through the lane beside the screen. That top corner gets left open when a goalie does that.

That’s high-level stuff.

In this regard, the Flyers being without Travis Konecny may have been a blessing in disguise for Foerster as it’s allowed him to blossom in a more natural role to him. When he returns, the lines should probably be constructed with this in mind.

Owen Tippett

Owen Tippett needs to do some reimagining of his game if his “chances of being a star,” as Tortorella describes it, are for real. The raw materials are mostly there, but how he uses these raw materials needs to be rather significantly altered.

Owen Tippett has the puck-transporting ability to carry play through the neutral zone as well as anyone in the NHL. For the most part, he already does. That part of his game is already there. Measured through zone exits and zone entries, he’s already an elite player as far as landing play in the offensive zone is concerned.

The problems arise once he crosses the blue line. For one thing, his finishing WAR is a bit of a lie. Because he generates so little in the way of individual expected goals, that he finishes in a remotely respectable way is a testament to his raw shooting ability. But it isn’t in the 99th percentile because he isn’t Patrik Laine or prime Ilya Kovalchuk, but he sure shoots like he is.

For him, being in the 100th percentile of rush shots taken is simply unnecessary. There is no justifiable reason for him to be shooting more off the rush than Auston Matthews, Kyle Connor, or (albeit barely) David Pastrnak.

His ill-advised rush shots lead to one-and-done sequences. He gets out ahead of his support, and he fires the puck into the glass, and then the other team picks it up because there’s nobody in position to muster up a quality forecheck. They exit their zone cleanly, and then they create offense the other way.

His defense is worse than the expected goal models are capturing.

Owen Tippett is on a good 5v5 team, and he is being outscored in his minutes. He just signed an extension for very significant money. If he properly reinvents himself, that $6.25M will be a steal. If he doesn’t? To call it fair money would be a best-case scenario.

When he’s established in the offensive zone, a relative rarity given how he plays the game, he essentially gets to hunting for space to unleash his shot. He’s good at finding places to shoot from. He’s relatively underwhelming at finding space to score from. Unlike Tyson Foerster, he doesn’t seem to have that high-level understanding of how and when to shoot.

That’s okay. If he can go from a shooter of unprecedented volume to a shooter of classically high volume, his goal production won’t dip. And he’ll likely see more assists come his way while his team out-scores the opponent in his minutes.

Given his skating and size, it’s insane to see him as barely above average in forecheck involvement. Essentially, he pressures puck carriers in the offensive zone at a rate that’s commensurate with league average. But Tippett should be well above league average, given the tools he has at his disposal.

Of course, it’s hard to forecheck when you’re busy looking for spaces to hit glass.

So much of Owen Tippett’s development rests solely on finding appropriate times to shoot. But there’s one more element to it.

He needs to develop a better delay game on his entries. When he can’t beat his defender with raw speed, that can’t be the end of his efforts. He can’t just sell out for a weak shot. He has to develop a way to keep the defender at bay while his support arrives.

Because he’s a winger, and so damn fast, he’s going to find himself out ahead of his teammates a lot. That means he needs to develop the techniques to eat the time it takes for them to catch up and help him invent dangerous offenses.

That can be a smooth cutback ala Brayden Point or Nikolaj Ehlers. Or it can be advanced puck protection like Roope Hintz or Jack Eichel. It can be some combination of the two.

But it has to be something. The micro-stat card is beautiful. The expected goal model is beautiful. But his game can’t only exist on a spreadsheet, to borrow the oft-used anti-analytics term. He’s getting paid now.

It’s time to have a real, tangible impact on the game.

Mandatory Credit: Matt Slocum – The Associated Press

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