The Flyers’ Collapse Is Upon Us
Back in November, I wrote this piece that prophesied a coming Flyers collapse. My prophecy has come to pass. In the last 6 games, all of which the team has lost, the team has been outscored 31-12.
The Flyers haven’t even resembled a competitive hockey team over this stretch. They’re replete with crippling flaws, and anyone who tells you that they’re actually supposed to be competing is being influenced either by copious amounts of drugs or the mendacious organization that built this disaster of a roster.
Bad news up front: the Flyers might have the worst special teams in recorded NHL history. I haven’t verified that statistic, but I’m absolutely certain that there aren’t many worse.
After a month of near league best penalty kill, regression has hit in full swing and the Flyers are now 21st in the league with 33 goals surrendered. They have a -30-goal differential on the penalty kill.
The power-play, meanwhile, continues their run of the worst production to ever be seen on ice. Their 20 power-play goals are tied for the lowest in the league. They’ve surrendered 4 and have a +16-goal differential on the power-play.
All together, they have a -14-goal differential on special teams.
The “good” news is that the Flyers have recovered their 5v5 possession play in the two months since I wrote that scathing piece. In that regard, they are now the epitome of mid with an expected score of 93-93 and an actual score of 95-95.
The thing is, even that goals against number seems awfully friendly given how horrific we know their goaltending to be. Sam Ersson and Aleksei Kolosov are sub-NHL quality goaltenders. Meanwhile, Dan Vladar… a goalie who’s been back-up quality his entire career… morphs into a well above league average starter?
That’s unlikely, and especially as injuries mount for Vladar, the likelihood is that you’ll experience further regression to the mean even when Vladar is in the net.
Their team finishing is being propped up by Linsanity runs from bottom-sixers, the Tocchet special, and by Zegras suddenly turning into an 18% shooter. Zegras is a talented shooter with a career conversion rate of 13%.
But if he finished at his career rate, he’d have 13 goals and 38 points through 47 games. A 66-point pace that’s certainly better than his previous two injury riddled seasons but also features him playing nearly 19 minutes a night. That’d essentially be a carbon copy of the player he was in his second NHL season.
That sounds like I’m dumping on Zegras, but even in that event, it’d still be a win relative to how the rest of the team is faring.
Stagnation and regression have been the only thing that important Flyers forwards have experienced, and that isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s familiar with the Tocchet system. If you aren’t, I wrote all about the Kevin Patullo themed problems with this style of play.
And it’s not as if this collapse is completely unexpected to those who understood how Tocchet coached teams actually play.
Here’s an extremely prescient passage from the creator of Broad Street Breakout on the differences in Michkov playing for Tocchet or Ferschweiler, written before either of them was hired.
“Tocchet’s style would have Michkov either crashing the net with other forwards or waiting for a quick transition–neither of which maximizes his elite playmaking ability and hockey IQ.”
Dame Lillard pulled up from the logo writing that one!
The entire piece is a good read from Broad Street Breakout, and you can read it here.
The burning question here, of course, is if a couple of people with decent hockey minds and laptops like Ryan Thompson or myself could paint vivid pictures of the problems behind hiring Rick Tocchet before they did it… why couldn’t the front office, armed with access to a wealth of information that none of us could replicate, see these same issues?
The answer is the crippling flaw of this front office, and it’s a flaw I discussed in imperfect and colloquial terms on the most recent episode of The Liberty Yell.
The front office suffers from an absolute dearth of objectivity. They can’t see things for what they are, because they’re so busy seeing things as they hope they might be. They can’t avoid mistakes because they’re too busy pontificating, “What if they aren’t mistakes?”
They speak to a former player, a former Flyer and friend of the organization, and they love speaking with him so much that they entirely forget his track record. Worse, they rewrite his track record in their own minds as a post-hoc justification of their error.
They watch Travis Konecny, who’s been in the organization long enough that he probably has made friends with the front office, and they decide that he needs to be extended long-term at the outset of a rebuild because they can’t personally bear the thought of being without him.
In order to justify their need to be tied to Konecny forevermore, they concoct a post-hoc justification that he’ll actually age like Brad Marchand, and his best years are ahead of him. Konecny hasn’t entirely fallen off a cliff yet, but the chinks in the armor are starting to appear, and we can firmly put to rest any possibility that the next Marchand is in the room with us.
Konecny isn’t to be blamed for not having one of the most anomalous aging curves of all time, of course. That was always unrealistic and unreasonable, and yet the front office plowed ahead anyway because they don’t have the objectivity required to take a clear-eyed look at the team.
Christian Dvorak’s extension was going to “fire up the boys,” and the front office was so determined to show how much their positive run of play meant to them, that they needed to put their money where their mouth was. They needed to extend a 30-year-old middle-six center for 5 years, taking him well past his prime. But since he means so much to the culture? They gave him a no-movement clause to boot, and he isn’t easily tradeable until the last year.
When nobody will want him anyway, and the next GM of the Flyers will have to pay for the privilege of removing Dvorak from the hockey team.
See, it would be one thing if this was merely a season turning sour. In many ways, that’s welcome. It’s necessary. The Flyers have zero high-end centers and defensemen whatsoever, and teams need at least one of those to win anything worthwhile.
The real issue isn’t the losing. The real issue isn’t even the way they’re losing, grab-ankle hockey.
The real issue is that no reasonable person should be possessed of even a modicum of faith in this front office to parlay this inadvertent tanking season into future success. Because they don’t believe that the mistakes they made are mistakes.
They will say anything to rationalize their own failures.
Unfortunately, they won’t do anything to rectify them.
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The article is spot on. I enjoyed both Jones and Briere as players, but as management making hockey decisions they are horrible. Instead of making the fans suffer year after year with a mediocre team that you have no intention of helping via trades, then just bring up all the younger players and let’s see what they can do. The Flyers have been painful to watch the last three years especially in the second half of each season. Please buyout Courtier’s contract because it’s really painful watching him embarrass all of the great captains of Flyers past. He’s a 4th line player playing in the top two lines making almost 8 million dollars a year.