Flyers Bench

How the Flyers Reached This Point

I try to keep these pieces from being scatter-shot. I pick a topic, and cover it to the fullest extent possible, preferring to go deeper rather than wider, but sometimes, it becomes necessary to zoom out. To bring in the holistic picture.

This is one such occasion. I’ve had many scattershot thoughts recently, all valuable on their own but too much to fully explore individually. When I reach this point, I try to tie everything together into one cohesive story. One narrative by which we can interpret our surroundings.

Fortunately, the Flyers made that easy. They provided me with one of the most opaque… and yet most consequential… questions a fan can ever ask about their hockey team.

How did the Flyers get here?

To answer that, it helps to look back at where we started. Now, that could go on for decades. But the reality is that franchises often make decisions that set the course of their next 3-5 years. Going back any further than 5 usually just means you missed a more recent, more relevant decision. Any shorter than 2? You captured a reaction instead of a plan.

For the Flyers, our last decision point dates back to May of 2023. Around that time, it became clear to the Flyers that they’d select Matvei Michkov at 7th overall.

On the Flyers’ board, Michkov was ranked 2nd. They saw him as another flavor of Connor Bedard. Someone who will bring fans out of their seats, someone who will be the primary engine of a team’s offense, and a phenom who can make the impossible look easy.

There were all kinds of controversies surrounding Michkov. All sorts of reasons not to take the plunge, ranging from geopolitical to character concerns to anything else.

The Flyers pushed ahead, determining those rumors to be unconvincing, and simultaneously accepted that this was a player they’d construct their entire team identity around. Because that’s the level of talent he was and is.

The first season where the Flyers began the process of constructing a team-identity around “the Mad Russian” was that 23-24 season.

They quickly discovered that it brought benefit to players besides the yet-to-arrive Michkov.

Guys like Sean Walker thrived in this system. Players like Travis Konecny and Owen Tippett had career years, and arguably, both earned themselves extensions based on that play.

The Flyers had turned “cheating” into team structure, sending the weak-side winger vertical on breakouts and lobbing the puck out to them any chance they got. As a result, they became one of the league’s most prolific rush teams. And the superstar talent, for whom this was all for, hadn’t even arrived yet.

Things were looking bright until the goaltending simply collapsed. Between the law catching up to Carter Hart and inability catching up to Sam Ersson, the Flyers finished the second half of the year with goaltending as splendidly horrific as you could imagine.

However, the Flyers believed that it was impossible for that problem to repeat itself.

Now, it was clear that Carter Hart would no longer be in the team’s plans. But they believed in Ersson, and they thought that he just had too much foisted upon him too quickly. With a summer to prepare for the workload of an NHL number 1, they imagined, he’d provide at least competent goaltending.

At the same time, Matvei Michkov was set to arrive that season. The Flyers scrambled and obfuscated, but it was obvious that this was set to happen as early as May of 2024, when I felt fully certain in that outcome.

The Flyers didn’t see themselves as ready for Michkov. They thought there was more work to be done, whether it be settling the crease, finding his future linemates, or adding additional wrinkles to the system that was built for him.

Nevertheless, here he was. And the system built for him was in place. So, they took the plunge.

The Flyers in 24-25 were essentially a full-season replay of the Flyers in the second half of 23-24, a genuinely good team ruined by historically awful goaltending.

But as the goaltending remained horrible, the system that was in place became diluted by a loss of confidence in most players, and even the skaters lost a certain edge.

On the other hand, Michkov did his part in establishing himself as a player worthy of having a team and system constructed around him.

It wasn’t a perfect rookie season, but what he did in context was simply marvelous.

From this point, in the summer before the 25-26 season, I believe there are two separate things we need to look at.

The Michkov side of things, and the team side of things.

The Michkov Side:

Discourse dies whenever the term “generational” comes up. I think there’s a better word to describe what Michkov is, for better and sometimes worse.

Prodigy.

He’s a hockey prodigy.

The game of hockey comes exceptionally easily to him. The reads, the movements, it’s all as natural to him as taking a breath. His mind for this sport is special, down to a concept known in neuroscience as proprioception. Spatial awareness relative to oneself.

Proprioception is the foundation of most of Michkov’s special traits. He has a preternatural feel for exactly how much space he has in every direction, exactly how close threats are, and exactly where the puck is in relation to his body.

It’s why there are moments when Michkov can seemingly just walk through people, navigating defenders as if they don’t have sticks and recovering pucks in the middle of his strides while anyone else would be dispossessed.

His reflexes on the ice border on instantaneous because his brain is just wired differently than most.

For most players, pace is paramount. The ability to keep your feet moving and receive pucks in motion will almost always determine your aptitude for producing NHL offense.

Morgan Frost has beautiful skating and fantastic hands, but his offensive breakout will probably never come because he simply can’t consistently make plays at pace.

Michkov upends the entire paradigm, routinely making plays at the NHL level that Morgan Frost made at the OHL level.

This neurological wiring, this outlier proprioception, is the reason why.

This entire section is meant to depict the freakish, otherworldly talents that Michkov possesses because there’s a dark side to being so gifted. Relatively speaking, at the very least.

Most prospects, just to make NHL teams covet them, have to reach out to trainers and nutritionists and all the rest. They have to dial in every aspect of their lives, both on and off the ice, to be worthy of an NHL draft selection. Even great prospects have needed this obsessive process to reach that status.

But Michkov didn’t. He just needed to step on the ice. And do his thing. He works incredibly hard at his craft; anyone will tell you how much time he spends on the ice. At one time, his goal scoring was his most desirable trait. He’s worked so hard to expand his on-ice vision that his playmaking is now the core of his game, taking his cognitive talents and seemingly magnifying the range with years of practice until he can sense the entirety of the ice as easily as he can sense the space immediately around himself.

But at the end of the day, he never needed to learn how to train off the ice.

Michkov wasn’t in NHL shape last year. Not at any point until he’d already played his way into NHL shape around December.

He was physically incapable of fulfilling an F1 role because he could not accelerate. He was too aggressive in his reads to consistently play the F3 role. In many ways, he was a mess. He really was.

And yet, he made up for all of it and more because he’s that talented. He’s a prodigy.

Everyone knows that, in order to reach his ceiling, he’ll need to dial in the athletic training. Nobody questions that.

But the constant discourse about how In Shape he is on a given day seems to neglect that, even working with handicaps, Matvei’s talent is so great that he can roll out of bed and be a really good NHL player.

I believe the Flyers saw everything I laid out and realized that Michkov couldn’t dial in his athletic training in Russia. To do that, he needed to have greater access to the professional trainers of the Flyers in Voorhees.

But Matvei is proud. If he isn’t failing, then he might not bother to make drastic changes. At least, I see where a reasonable person would conclude that.

To that end, I wonder if we were always going to get the “In Shape” drama, no matter who was hired as the head coach of the Flyers.

Not because it was actually that big of a deal, but because the Flyers wanted to engineer a minor fall from grace for Matvei.

Shame is a great motivator for someone so talented. Even marginal failures can create existential crises in the psychology of someone who’s so thoroughly unaccustomed to failing.

So, you mess with his minutes a little. Keep him down around 14 or 15. You keep him off the top power-play unit. You hit him with some noise in the media, just a little. And you make sure his stats reach a place where Matvei can’t dig out of it when you let the leash off in January or so.

And then you give him the room to run, let him taste success in the second half of the season.

Suddenly, Matvei is desperate to replicate that feeling for 82 games if not go even further beyond, and that’s how you might artfully wield carrots and sticks to incentivize him into fully dialing in his off-ice training regimen.

For that reason, I don’t think the Flyers believed Rick Tocchet was straying too far from the bounds of acceptable behavior for Matvei during this October to December stretch.

However, Tocchet has crossed lines in how he’s handled the situation, routinely putting too much pressure on, because I believe his resentment for someone like Matvei is entirely genuine.

I can only imagine how he feels about someone who didn’t have to do everything right to reach this level.

It’s palpable. He tells you as much almost every day.

He can have those personal resentments, but to allow those to spill out into the public is completely unacceptable.

He has done so numerous times, and he should be fired for that alone.

A larger problem? There’s also no carrot in sight, and it’s February. A key part of the plan is Michkov ending his season on a high note, going into the summer with some bitterness about how he started, but nevertheless being as excited to get to work as he is upset about his beginning.

Tocchet is bungling the plan because he’s not fully in on the gag, and his deviation from it is worth termination.

It does seem like his job is hanging on by a fraying thread.

Briere put himself in front of a firing squad to quell the latest PR catastrophe that came as a result of Tocchet opening his mouth, wherein he told a number of explicit falsehoods and logically contradictory statements.

I believe the clown he made of himself was somewhat intentional. Perhaps not exactly part of a plan, but a message sent that everyone heard.

“We won’t do this again for you.”

And that wasn’t just about Matvei.

The Team’s Side.

Without taking away from the importance of Michkov, there is an entire team that exists besides him. It’s a testament to his singular on-ice charisma and his objective importance to the franchise that he’s worth his own analysis independent of the team.

But the team has its own list of problems.

To start, the team has abandoned all of the principles behind the system built for Michkov that had such tremendous benefits to others. The system in which Jamie Drysdale started to grow up is now gone, the principles that made him so tantalizing as a player no longer employed.

The Flyers once routinely brought 4 players into the rush, trusting Michkov to use his unique talents to find the right option when he was given the extra options and trusting people like Konecny to benefit from the same structure.

Now, the Flyers are lucky to get a rush at all, much less to bring extra men into the play.

All of this was done on the basis that having additional players hanging back would create more of a safety net and help the goalies.

The goalies haven’t been helped. Instead, we’ve traded one problem for another.

Instead of occasionally getting burned for bringing too many defensive resources into a transition attack, we’re getting burned because the centers and defensemen are too often stepping on each other’s toes and covering the same guy while a separate player is left wide open.

The defensive breakdowns still happen; they just take on a different flavor.

The Flyers were becoming very concerned with their PDO. Torts said as much. A stat familiar to most fans. It’s the sum of a team’s shooting and save percentages.

Rick Tocchet’s Canucks were going on an absolutely mind-bending PDO heater while the Flyers were experiencing a horrific PDO for the ages.

A fundamental conceit of hockey men is that they can control every stat with things beyond personnel. A stretch of poor PDO isn’t just a stretch of poor PDO, or bad goaltending isn’t just bad goaltending.

That’s why coaches get fired, ultimately, because of PDO runs. They also get hired off of PDO runs.

The Flyers estimated that Tocchet could bring this “PDO magic” to Philadelphia, even in a diluted form. They rationalized it by saying that it was the way he taught net front play, or the number of resources he dedicated to down-low defensive structure.

What we’ve seen now is that this just isn’t real. Yes, all of the defensive breakdowns you saw before actually happened. Yes, all of the extra goals that the Canucks scored actually happened.

But they don’t necessarily mean anything in the aggregate. There is no PDO optimizing system.

Beyond that, Tocchet came in with a clear-eyed rejection of the rebuild plan. He simply doesn’t care about it. He came in to do things his way, and I don’t think he sold himself that way when he was hired.

In public, Briere may protest otherwise, but this is not normal. It is, however, normal for Rick Tocchet. In fact, it just happened again as of the writing of this piece.

The truth is that the organization has probably stepped in for Michkov on countless occasions already, and that’s the only reason he hasn’t been healthy scratched at least once.

This simply isn’t a tenable relationship. Fortunately, that which can’t last… won’t.

But the front office has deeper problems.

A Wayward Rebuild.

We can argue for days about the nuances of the Flyers’ rebuild, but the simple fact is that they deviated from their chosen course this season with no great fruit to harvest for their trouble.

Nobody is going to be more upset about that than Comcast, which sunk a lot of money into this plan that goes well beyond their duties per the salary cap. They did all of this at the advice of hockey ops personnel, led by Daniel Briere and Keith Jones.

They raised season ticket prices this year for the first time in years, and they didn’t receive any great boon in attendance. It’s almost a guarantee that attendance falls off a cliff next year, regardless of what the Flyers do.

Fans simply won’t fork out the extra money for this product. Comcast is going to demand change, as well they should. But the change won’t be about next season.

It’ll be about using next season to hook fans again and recoup the lost sales.

Briere and Jones will have to be sober and convincing about why this season went awry, about how they’re going to fix the problem, and how quickly they can do that.

If their answers aren’t clear or convincing enough, they’ll be gone.

If Briere insists to Comcast, as he did to the fans, that nothing is wrong? He’ll be gone.

Ultimately, I’m somewhat optimistic for next season. Not because I expect the Flyers to be particularly good. Who knows?

I do, however, believe they’ll be fun again. For the first time in a while. Because they have to be. The money demands it. And in this world, money talks with a louder voice than the most boisterous and charismatic man.

But where we’re going is the topic of another day. For now, there it is.

This is how the Flyers got here.

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