Flyers Watchability Poll

The Philadelphia Flyers Watchability Poll

When discussing the Flyers, naturally, everything becomes about… the contending cycle. How far are they from contention? Will they win a Stanley Cup by the time the earth collapses into space rubble? Will they make the playoffs by the time we all have grandkids?

All important questions, but another question that might be even more important is… how much fun are you having on a game-by-game basis?

At the end of the day, professional sports is an entertainment medium. It exists for no other reason than the entertainment of the audience. The Stanley Cup only means something because fans have assigned it meaning, because viewers have decided that it’s fun and interesting to determine who the best NHL team was that particular season.

To that end, I conducted a series of polls that served as an impromptu survey meant to determine the answer to a few simple questions.

How much fun are you having? Are the Flyers doing everything reasonably within their power to maximize your viewing experience? And how might they go about perfecting the amount of entertainment they bring to you?

Flyers Watchability Poll:

The top-line results are catastrophic. 307 respondents have participated. Among those 307, approximately one person described the Flyers as an extremely fun hockey team.

Only 11.7% describe the Flyers as a fun hockey team.

The remaining 88% describe the Flyers as either boring or extremely boring. That group is almost evenly split between people who will slay boring flatly or put the emphasis on it.

At the end of the day, no respondents were willingly to say with pure conviction that the Flyers are a fun hockey team. Nearly half of respondents were willing to say with conviction that the Flyers are a boring hockey team.

They’re failing in their fundamental task: to entertain the audience.

You might believe that the most important task for a hockey team is to win games. That’s wrong. The most important task for a hockey team is to entertain fans and sell tickets and merchandise and justify TV deals. That’s what allows professional hockey to exist. Winning is only useful insofar as it serves that purpose.

Among the questions I asked, one of them was if winning is fully tantamount to a fun hockey team or if there was more nuance to the conversation than that. Can you be fun simply by winning, or does it take more?

Only 15.1% of respondents believe that winning is necessarily fun. Interestingly, that number is pretty close to the number of respondents who say the Flyers are fun right now.

It makes you think that these results could actually be worse if the Flyers weren’t in the thick of things in the eastern conference. For the moment, anyway.

Is there a level of winning that can justify a lack of entertainment? The question has evenly divided fans between people who think a Conference Finals appearance is worth it, a Cup is worth it, nothing is worth it, and the playoffs are worth it.

For the Flyers’ purposes, the only realistic goal for this season is the playoffs. Only 25% agree that making the playoffs would be enough winning to justify a boring hockey team.

So, they’re failing at their fundamental task, and winning doesn’t seem like a viable cure for these ails. That leaves the question. What exactly is wrong here? Why are fans so bored?

When asked if Rick Tocchet has some level of culpability for the boredom of the Flyers, 96.4% of respondents agree that he does. Of that group, 74.8% believe that Tocchet either has majority or full culpability for the boredom of the team.

The first thing that would usually get fingers pointed at it for boredom is the roster. Boring team has to mean boring players. Right?

However, with the roster as is, 83.2% of respondents believe that the team should actually be more fun than it is right now. Most of the remainder believes that the roster is providing as much fun as expected, and only 1.5% believe that the team is more fun than it should be when considering its roster.

Asked slightly differently, 89.3% of respondents believe that the team is less fun than expected given the quality of the roster.

When asked if they have hope that these problems will work themselves out over the course of the year, 72.3% of respondents report little or no hope that the conditions will improve.

I take this less as a belief that something can’t change, but rather an affirmation that things are so bad from an entertainment perspective that most voters can’t even imagine a world where it gets better. They won’t even dare to fathom such a world.

Only 0.8% of respondents report full hope that things will get better this season.

Asked directly if the roster improving would necessarily improve the entertainment value of the team, 42.1% percent of respondents report believing that more talent is necessarily tantamount to more fun. 38.9% believe that it helps but more must be done, and 19.6% are so disenchanted as to believe that more talent won’t even help.

When asked if they connect with individual players or the team as a concept more, the voters are evenly split. 52.3%, relevant for political horse races but not as much for general vibes statistics, report that they connect with players more than “the crest,” as it were.

Among the respondents who report being more connected to players, this might be the best news in the survey for the Flyers as an organization.

98.8% of respondents report having at least one player that they feel connected to, and the majority reports having “some” players that they feel connected to. Only 28.4% describe their connections as “maybe one or two.”

In other words, the raw material is present for a hockey team that’s viewed as fun. The pieces just haven’t been put together.

To explain a lot of the sentiment, only 17.9% of respondents believe that either some or all of the players they’re connected to play a prominent role on the team.

When asked if the players they’re connected to having their roles increased would lead to more enjoyment of the product, 93% of respondents agreed that it would.

This seems to get to the “use Michkov more” conversation. I didn’t ask that question directly because I didn’t want to polarize the results. But when we divorce ourselves from the questions of who’s at fault and who’s justified, we get almost ubiquitous agreement.

For many fans, perhaps a large majority of fans, the enjoyment they derive from Flyers hockey is almost entirely tied to the prominence and success of Matvei Michkov. He’s the cash cow. A prominent role for Michkov is, at this stage, more important to most respondents than winning a particular game.

He’s an electric talent who’s been hyped for years before he was drafted and, last year, he delivered on the hype far more than he didn’t.

It’d be unfair to say that Michkov explains all of what’s happening. For one, he’s not even the only admired player with ice-time controversies.

Nikita Grebenkin is still an in-and-out fourth line. Emil Andrae was only introduced into the top 4 two games ago. Trevor Zegras is playing a lot of minutes, but doing so on the wing has been a cause of eye-rolling for fans.

Many fans want to see him attacking the middle of the ice with speed without having to work his way off the wall first, and they want to see a massive skill jump in the wingers he plays alongside.

Tyson Foerster has spent most of the season as a guy in a checking role, even if his minutes are high. Most fans want him with linemates who can amplify his natural scoring ability more consistently and maybe find him some opportunity to make some plays.

Michkov is the highest profile and most egregious example, but he’s far from the only victim of usage different than what fans would pay to see.

The fans have an entirely different concept for this team in their imagination than the one we actually see hit the ice on a nightly basis. What is… is not what should be.

Among “team first” fans, only 10.3% report feeling that their interests as a fan are being catered to. Among the 89.7% of fans who report otherwise, only 2% believe that winning is the only cure for this feeling.

The individual thing that most fans want to see changed is the playstyle of the team. The conservative hockey that the team plays now has been a sore spot for the entertainment value of the team. The dump and chase reliance has led to the team chasing interested fans rather than pucks.

Everyone in the NHL wants to be the Panthers, but the fact is, it’s incredibly hard to be the Panthers. And it’s not nearly as ubiquitous among these fans that everyone wants to be the Panthers.

While 26.3% of fans most want to emulate the Panthers from an entertainment perspective, 65% of the respondents believe the Avalanche is the team to emulate for entertainment value. The Avalanche might be the stark opposite of the Panthers.

It isn’t the speed that fans most want from the Avalanche style of play, though. While 12.3% of respondents do want to see the Flyers get faster most of all and add more speed, 80% of these voters would prefer the Flyers to add more skill most of all. Only 7% want a more physical or more defensive team.

For the last portion, I provided a forum for some of the respondents to add their own comments open-ended.

And that seems to be a good description of the problem here. Very few people disagree with the notion that the Flyers have the tools to be fun. They might not be an inner circle contender or anything, but it’s a general consensus that the raw material is there to be fun. But they’re not turning those tools into production.

And then some among us are even less forgiving, but really… they bring this on themselves.

Burn! So true it burns…

As succinct as a description for current events as one will find.

A longer reply, but one that hits at the core of the issue in a deeper way. What fans would give for things to actually feel like a “New Era of Orange.”

All in all, the Flyers’ record is good. But the process that went into achieving that record? Lacking. They’re failing their most important task.

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