Flyers News: Biggest Exit Day Takeaways

Tortorella’s talk about the power-play was, frankly, baffling. Worse than that, it was an insult to the intelligence of an amoeba. Any living organism could do the basic math required to conclude that nothing he said made any sense.

The power-play… somehow.

It started by saying that Rocky Thompson is a “tremendous coach with a lot of bright ideas,” which would be a searing indictment of the offensive capabilities of the personnel if it’s true.

Instead, he also says that the players were capable of far more than being the league’s worst power-play by a significant margin. Which, in fairness, I do believe and is self-explanatory when you see some of the teams above them.

But I don’t know how we square this circle when we talk about Rocky Thompson being a power-play genius in the same breath we say that the power-play has been mismanaged from a coaching standpoint.

He made a point to say that the Flyers have a lot of great former power-play players in their front-office ranks, and they do. Danny Briere, Dany Heatley, Patrick Sharp, and John LeClair were all very good offensive and power-play players.

So he talks about all of them coming together in the summer to “figure things out,” along with noted genius Rocky Thompson.

Okay, fine, but I have a question. Why the hell wasn’t this done already? If the brilliance of the men in the room was truly sufficient, why did it take until after game 82 to convene them in a room and talk it out with tape in front of them?

It is not illegal to have meetings and make meaningful changes during an NHL season, and if you couldn’t do it then, why would I be confident that you can do it now?

That whole diatribe was a way to deflect responsibility away from anyone involved.

“Don’t worry, the good old boys in the room will figure out how to make the power-play work,” they say.

An unadulterated and unfunny joke.

Despite hedging, I detected a hint of… foreshadowing

Full disclosure: I don’t have the same read of these statements as some other people do. There is a more cynical way to read this portion of the exit day press conference, but Danny spoke multiple times about finding a hockey trade to augment the talent of the team.

Every time he mentioned not making a move, he addressed a very specific kind of move where he’d be trading younger assets for aging talent. Which is a strawman. A universally agreed-upon bad idea.

He jokingly said that “it’s really hard to acquire talent,” because it is in the literal sense. The Oilers aren’t calling up and saying, “Yo. I bet you want Connor McDavid and Evan Bouchard in a package deal, yeah? Come get him. For Morgan Frost and a 1st.”

That isn’t happening.

But the idea that the Flyers will find a player who they believe has a ceiling beyond what they’ve shown with their current teams that still fits within the age range of the guys they seemingly love most on the current roster (Tyson Foerster and Cam York) is in play.

Does that mean it happens? No. It takes two to tango.

But it was an idea that he voluntarily brought up several times, and I see that more as foreshadowing than anything else. The plan is to make it happen.

And, I mean. I think the talent deficiency problem is a tad overstated by the Flyers community writ large. Even myself, at times.

Look, the Flyers were in the playoff hunt until game 82. They were one goal and one Detroit goal not scored from being one of the teams who advanced to the second season, and do you know what kind of forwards they most frequently ran as top-6 players?

Ryan Poehling. Noah Cates. Garnett Hathaway. Tyson Foerster spent a large chunk of his rookie season being worse at scoring than any of these guys.

They didn’t just lack superstar talent. They ran offensive zeroes in top-6 roles. Do you know what kind of impact it would have to run genuine top-6 players with actual offensive talent instead of Ryan Poehling in your scoring role?

The delta here is massive, and that’s just by acquiring players who aren’t stars. God forbid you find a guy or two who grows into a star, and suddenly your entire forward group is massively different from the collection of zero-touch wonders you just ran to the brink of the playoffs with.

The Flyers were bad at in-zone offense… no, really?

John Tortorella talked about loving the results of bringing a new, high-flying identity to the team. Becoming a team that stretches the ice vertically from the defensive zone and looks to cause turnovers in the neutral zone and spring counterattacks gave them a way of creating offense that previously didn’t exist.

It won them more games because they went from 0 reliable ways to score to 1 reliable way to score.

But Tortorella rather correctly pointed out that 1 reliable way to score is simply insufficient. And once the Flyers were in a half-court setting, their ability to create offense was quite literally nonexistent.

Unlike prior times, he was careful to point out that this isn’t an issue of forechecking. They forechecked plenty hard and they won a lot of pucks in the offensive zone, but there simply isn’t much of a point to winning these battles if you can’t create new opportunities.

While you’re watching the NHL playoffs, particularly on the battle between the Leafs and the Bruins, keep a close eye on Auston Matthews. He’s the best player in the world at creating high-danger offense immediately after a forechecking sequence.

He doesn’t just strip players of the puck. He steals the puck, slips a pass to his line-mate in front of the net, and then appears in front of the net to get an individual chance off of the rebound. He’s mastered the small area game offensively.

He is to the half-court what Connor McDavid or Nathan MacKinnon are to the rush game.

The Flyers will never be that. Though truth be told, I do occasionally see glimpses of that when I watch Matvei Michkov.

But they don’t have to be that. They just need to be 60% of that. They just need to present more of a threat in those settings while they keep their identity of a rush team.

Now, will they do that? Hard to say! They don’t have a ton of cycle threats on the roster right now, even if they do have some guys who represent a threat on the fast break.

Jamie Drysdale is a 99th-percentile NHL athlete

To set the stage for this section, I want to take everyone back to the first games of Drysdale in a Flyers uniform where those first impressions happened. Ask anybody, and they couldn’t stop gushing about what a ridiculous skater he was.

Even those more skeptical of Drysdale would freely admit that they were watching a next-level skater.

Then Danny Briere comes out and says that Drysdale’s core injury, suffered early in the season while he was a member of the Anaheim Ducks, wouldn’t stop bothering him until he had surgery on it. He forewent the surgery because playing through the injury couldn’t make it worse, and because he felt like he had already missed too many games in his young career to miss out on the opportunity to collect more reps at the NHL level.

So he endured a hell of a lot of pain and kept playing, but most importantly… it was his SKATING that was most compromised.

I need everyone to fully wrap their heads around what was just said. The skating that impressed everyone? The skating that appeared in flashes of abject brilliance? It was a shell of what it actually can be.

I won’t pretend that injuries aren’t a concern. The risk that they just keep piling up and that Jamie’s potential is never actualized? That’s real. I’m not going to sit here and pretend it isn’t a legitimate concern.

But, at the same time, we are dealing with a 99th percentile NHL athlete here. Simply put, the guys who come in and play this sport usually aren’t as gifted athletically as Jamie Drysdale is. They don’t have the same quick twitch muscle fibers. They aren’t as innately explosive and preternaturally agile.

Hell, if you threw this guy on the NFL combine one year, I bet he’d dominate the 40-yard dash and the three-cone events.

The utility of this is that it throws a wrench into conventional aging models. Aging models are built to represent the career of an average NHL player, but Jamie–speaking purely as an athlete–blows the average NHLer out of the water. His athletic gifts will be remarkably durable compared to what we’ve typically come to expect.

He’ll retain more of his athleticism at a later age than most would think possible, and the cost of injuries will be lesser. The only risk is that he spends so much of his formative years compromised that he never gets to put in the reps to truly build his game at the NHL level.

And that may happen. Again, I won’t sugarcoat that.

But also, we are not dealing with a normal human. I’m not comparing them as players, but this is the level of athlete we’re dealing with…

Erik Karlsson spends his age 30 season onwards with an assortment of injuries that completely sabotage his career. It lasts years. This should mark the decline and ultimate collapse of EK65’s career. Instead? He gets healthy again, he moves past the injuries, and suddenly he’s everything that he was before that round of injuries.

His Achilles injury had more of a lasting effect on his skating, but even with a freak injury that debilitating? The cost was going from a true 1-of-1 skater to just a more banally elite skater.

Yeah, being a true top-shelf athlete is a hell of a mulligan for a career! A whole lot of shit can go wrong and you still don’t have to suffer long-term consequences. Drysdale has the unique privilege of being one of the few people on earth who can run circles around the NHL as an athlete.

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Mandatory Credit: flyers Twitter

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