The real concern with the Philadelphia Flyers’ meltdown

The Flyers are 2-6-1 for 5 points on the season. They’re currently 31st (of 32) teams in the NHL with 5 points accumulated over 9 games. To start the year, they’re melting down and it looks every bit as if it’s an intentional tank-job.

Now, many will say that this is wonderful news.

Finally, the Flyers are tanking so they can stock up on elite talents–hopefully at the center position–to compliment Matvei Michkov.

With the #2 overall pick in this upcoming draft, our fortunes are changed forever!

Unfortunately, I’m not so sanguine when it comes to this Chernobyl level disaster of a hockey team hitting its melting point and burning through the control rods to create a calamity beyond parallel.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to a hockey team bottoming out intentionally in order to accrue high draft picks. However, I view it a bit differently than most. In my opinion, a healthy sports franchise is largely cyclical. With some room for year-to-year variation, it is therefore predictable.

You start out with nothing. You finish at the bottom of the league organically, and you accumulate high picks. Those high picks become faces of the NHL, and players who define an era of the sport. Those players lead you to a contending period.

Through shrewd management, you can capitalize on that window–and provided with some luck along the way–win a Stanley Cup. Ultimately, those players eventually age out of their primes and create a situation where a team is organically bottoming out again in order to create the next era for that team.

It’s a cycle. There’s minimum intervention required. The incentives of the NHL are to ride this cycle, and you can tell when teams are doing that. You can also tell when teams aren’t doing that.

The Flyers aren’t doing that. It’s not to say that what the Flyers are attempting never works. That would be false. The Flyers are just attempting to outsmart the system like others around the league have.

The Vegas Golden Knights have not adhered to the cycle. Instead, Kelly McCrimmon has pulled every lever and pushed every button in order to build a contending hockey team from the ground-up. The NHL trade market is his personal grocery store. He believes in, essentially, NBA doctrine: “There’s always another trade to be made.”

He did it with a two-pronged attack on the NHL trade market. First, and this stage began immediately at the expansion draft, McCrimmon identified the “headaches” of other teams. Players who never made it in their current home. The “misfit toys” of the world.

He built a young, plucky team in 2017 that played disciplined, structured hockey all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. But McCrimmon knew that this wasn’t the end-goal. This couldn’t be treated as a mission accomplished. No, this success was a stepping stone.

McCrimmon realized that creating a contending, uppity team that lacked high-end talent was actually quite appealing to high-end talent out there. Stars that have become either disenchanted by their current teams, or downright disgruntled. For that class of player, the Vegas Golden Knights are quite appealing. They’re the missing piece to a Cup, and they know it.

Vegas has complimented that status by adding state-of-the-art facilities and ensuring that the Golden Knights, as a franchise, is as comfortable as a work environment as you can find.

That allowed them to trade for Mark Stone. That allowed them to trade for Jack Eichel. That allowed them to sign a rare star who made free agency in Alex Pietrangelo. They made themselves a destination.

In so doing, they performed an end-around of the established system by acquiring the disgruntled stars of other teams. They supercharged by the process by continuing to add, taking another principle from the NBA. They’ve realized that the first-round picks of a team in their contending window are entirely useless. They are, in fact, best utilized as ammunition in order to construct the team.

People believe that Vegas is somehow going to end up on the losing side of all of this, but McCrimmon has accounted for that possibility, too. See, Vegas has yet to trade a first round pick that will occur past the likely point of their competitive window.

When the team he’s built ages out of competitive viability, as all teams do, Kelly will have a choice. He can either hop onto the organic cycle that he just ended around with a myriad of trades. He can draft elite talent and construct the new era of Golden Knights hockey in the “conventional” manner.

Or he can do it all over again, identifying another batch of disgruntled stars to poach and construct another competitive core with.

When the Flyers talk about “making themselves a destination,” I believe that’s probably what they’re talking about. They seek to upend the system, much like Vegas did. But in order to make yourself a destination, you have to actually do what Vegas did. You have to be a competitive team that needs the push of a couple stars in order to realize ultimate success.

In 23-24, the Flyers seemed to be on a track to accomplishing that. While everyone wailed at the possibility of not selecting in the top 5, the truth was that they had indeed put themselves on a path to upending the system.

During that time, the Flyers took a victory lap and locked in the players who were on expiring contracts that created this plucky and surprisingly competitive hockey team. In so doing, they locked themselves into this path.

The Travis Konecny and Owen Tippett contract extensions were a triumphant yell that they were going to be the next Golden Knights, and they’d continue to be a plucky franchise on the fringes of competitiveness while Matvei Michkov developed and while they went shopping for a couple of disgruntled stars to add to the mix.

If they don’t repair their current situation, they will draft very high. But it will be all for naught. Why? Because the Flyers have locked in many key pieces of the roster that produced this awful result. They can’t construct a new roster without doing something dramatic.

Perhaps the “something dramatic” is a topic best saved for another article. But in the absence of such a dramatic change, you are left with Michael Misa and Matvei Michkov attempting to carry the failing appendage that is the Flyers’ roster to glory.

But that never works. Hockey teams are teams. You have to build a team. Not pray that 2 or 3 guys carry you to the promised land while your entire team underneath of them is a massive disaster.

In fact, the plan that people are currently advocating is what allows for Vegas to operate. The disgruntled stars are the products of failed tank-jobs. The Flyers are currently executing a failed tank-job.

They’re doing a great job at convincing Matvei Michkov to leave Philly for the next Golden Knights or Panthers.

So they better get a clue.

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