The Ended Flyers Thread

LegoDoom 2022-04-14 22:23:53 UTC #1144

And I disagree a bit. York is a good skater and has good hockey sense. He's just not very quick and his shot is ok, but not great. I just don't see how that transfers to a special player. I love smart hockey players, but it's pretty much the equivalent to an undersized Farabee... who has regressed.

Just take the undersized player with top tier skating, puck-handling, passing, and scoring. I understand putting hockey sense at the top of the list, but it's not like Caufield is lacking in that department.

EDIT: Also, if you go back to the posts during the 2019 NHL draft, this isn't a new opinion. Other posters also wanted Caufield.

LegoDoom 2022-04-14 22:47:42 UTC #1145

Austinfan:

Caufield's frame is not going to allow him to add much weight, he's probably going to be similar to DeBrincat, who is a top scorer, but otherwise pretty much a cipher. The problem is these are guys you want off the ice with a lead, and who often disappear in the playoffs when the windows get tighter and there's a lot more contact. There's a reason he dropped to #15, and it's not because teams doubt his scoring, but the object isn't to score the most goals but win the Cup.

Top 9 teams in goal scoring: 6 exited in the first round, San Jose was saved by the refs, Chicago #8 and Florida #9 didn't make the playoffs. Flyers were 12th in 2017-18, 18th last year, I expect with AV and the addition of Hayes, Frost and eventually Farabee, Ratclifee, Rubtsov, etc., they'll be consistently in the top ten in goals scored without adding a "scorer."

Brink has more risk than Caufield, but he can probably fill out to 5'8 175-180 (stouter than Caufield), a size where you find a lot more small players succeeding in the NHL and some even capable of playing two way hockey.

Caufield had 12 points in 20 playoff games as a 20 year old while getting 15m TOI. York and Brink didn't really fill out.

Then again, I didn't realize you didn't need to score goals to win the cup. Apparently you need to stop goals? York seems undersized to do that. There's a reason he dropped to #14.

VoteForKalas 2022-04-15 12:35:40 UTC #1146

Disagree on York. I do not trust Flyers fans as the arbiter of good talent or performance. It's like Scott Rolen talking about how great Rico Brogna is as a player.

LegoDoom 2022-04-15 14:42:05 UTC #1147

Maybe we have a different definition of elite.

And while I like Provorov, this has to be the low point of the team since I've watched the them (almost 30 years)

https://twitter.com/ProducerDrew_/status/1514071657861763080

Aquapong 2022-04-15 20:58:02 UTC #1148

Farabee was playing center for a while as an experiment. They need to just keep him at wing.

I don’t get drafting small defensemen, but York is here. I always thought they should have moved Ghost to wing.

Provorov was really good to start, but it seems he’s regressed the last two years. He’s probably a 1B. He needs a 1A to be paired with. Too many bad turnovers in our zone.

bigegypt0417 2022-04-18 00:55:16 UTC #1149

Flyers have the 4th worst record...they could get to 3.

xogfog 2022-04-18 08:38:06 UTC #1150

doesn't matter that much with the lottery, with their luck, they'll end up 7th...

Docs 2022-04-18 13:27:54 UTC #1151

With the weighted lottery the final position doesn't matter so much for that top pick, but their final position still matters if they don't land the top pick and get passed by two teams. We still want the worst case scenario for the flyers to be picking in the top 6 even if two teams pass them in the lottery.

bkeich 2022-05-01 12:55:42 UTC #1152

Well, the Flyers thread was on page 3. That says a lot.

Has any season ever ended with so little fanfare?

The team unloaded a recent #2 pick for almost nothing.
The team unloaded its best player of the last 15 seasons for a little bit.

I would be SHOCKED if this team made the playoffs next year. The team will blame injuries, but most of the team was still intact when this team was near the bottom of the standings. It obviously collapsed when we switched to an AHL lineup, but it wasn't good when we had our best lineup out there.

5 years to build? Longer?

Aquapong 2022-05-01 13:59:44 UTC #1153

It’s tough to have a good season when your 1st and second line centers and the guy who was supposed to be your top defensemen were injured for most of the year. Giroux should be a complementary piece at this point in his career, not the guy you are depending on. The Ovechkin’s of the world are few and far between. It’s obvious that when they were playing so many young players that it was about getting them experience and seeing what we had to work with more than winning.

I see a few big scheme problems. One, they dump the puck out of their zone with no plan to transition to the attack. So the other team just regains possession and comes right back in. Two, too many bad turnovers in our end. Three, offensive zone entries have been pathetic. We have players built more for finesse. Trying to dump and chase isn’t likely going to work.

I heard from someone who had read an article that Ellis was blindsided by the trade and was pissed about it. The article said he didn’t like the Flyers training staff and was rehab’ing his injury on his own and has made no progress. He didn’t want surgery and now it sounds like he’ll need it anyway and won’t be ready for training camp.

VoteForKalas 2022-05-01 14:16:23 UTC #1154

Until they commit to a real rebuild and do not short cut it like they did after firing Hextall, very little will change. I do not think that will happen under Comcast so my hope is they will sell to an ownership group that cares about hockey, understands hockey, cares about the Flyers and the fans. The team is not just a cash register.

Since the pandemic, I believe from reports Comcast has been losing money on the Flyers which never happened before. The fans have checked out, do not trust Comcast, have witnessed what Fletcher has done (like he did in MN) to damage the team and understand when you sign players like Risto, Hayes and Ellis to horrible contracts you are destroying the future.

The media has also finally turned on the Flyers; for decades under Snider and Comcast post-1996 there had been a cadre of local and national media that backed the Flyers and helped them retain the good reputation from the two Cup wins and the successful 1980s. People could still point to fairly recent success and the Flyers could still bully other teams with their money advantage.

Since the cap was implemented, the Flyers decline has been pretty steep with one year blips in 2008, 2010 and 2020. Their money advantage was eliminated and their major weaknesses in talent evaluation, acquisition and development along with their hockey operations management were exposed to the world. They still have not figured out how to ice a competitive roster within the cap structure and maintain it. Constantly, players, coaches, GMs are shifted in and out with no continuity or stability.

Finally, they decided to bring Hextall in to help usher in a new era. Hextall acquired quite a bit of good talent and got the cap situation under much better control. However, the Flyers had included a poison pill into this new era. They wanted the appearance of a rebuild, but not the reality of one i.e. several losing seasons missing the playoffs. Therefore, Hextall had the impossible task of trying to rebuild a franchise while simultaneously have a team competing for the playoffs every year. They made the playoffs 2 of the 4 years Hextall was GM, but lost in the 1st rd both times as expected for a rebuilding team.

Comcast stepped in, fired Hextall, hired Fletcher and have made the playoffs once in the last four seasons. Like you said, we traded away Voracek and Giroux which had to happen (and should have been done earlier if the Flyers had allowed a real rebuild) for limited value. The young talent have all regressed under Fletcher and the three coaches he has used (Gordon, Vigneault and Yeo). Older vets have been signed to stupid contracts to get us into "contentIon" quicker and our cap is again maxed out.

zambonir 2022-05-01 16:23:37 UTC #1155

Ellis actually gave his first interview of the season and said he's not having surgery and can't wait to be back (and expects to be in training camp).

I think this covers most of it though. From the injuries excuse (some validity) to the failure to actually draft or develop players to the shortcomings of the GM. But most of all:

The problem is, when it comes to the hockey team, we’re getting all the bad parts of Flyers culture without any of the good. The people in charge are being allowed to sell that a Ristolainen overpay is necessary because the Flyers have to remain the Flyers. A rebuild apparently isn’t being considered at least in part because “it’s not what the Flyers do.” But those drawbacks — overpays based on intangibles and a win-at-all-costs mentality that often led to counterproductive, short-term thinking in the past — aren’t being counteracted by the best parts of the culture: the heart-on-sleeve sincerity from ownership (impossible from a corporate entity, particularly in this day and age), Snider’s big personality and unscripted honesty, the aggressive, star-hunting roster moves that signaled to the fans that the team truly was always going for it, and finally, the unmistakable perception that the people at the top really, truly care. Recent shifts aside, that’s just not there anymore for a not-insignificant part of the fan base.

And that’s why it’s not just the losses that made this the worst season in franchise history. It’s because there isn’t a level of this organization that doesn’t appear to be failing at their jobs right now. It’s because things are bad, and despite the “aggressive retool” concept pitched by Fletcher and Scott in January, there’s not a lot of hope that they’ll be getting better anytime soon.

I don't really understand what the team's value is to Comcast anymore, except perhaps the company's own sentimental attachment to Snider and the building. Maybe they will move on once the bigger-picture future of their RSNs and streaming operations become clear.

I wouldn't say "Comcast" fired Hextall though - what happened there was, because no one with the company is really engaged with or qualified to run the team (which at least Peter Luukko was) Holmgren and Clarke were able to fill the void and go back to the same old same old. They wound up having more sway with Scott than Hextall did, even though Hextall used to be one of their guys.

flyers19rw 2022-05-01 17:14:02 UTC #1156

On the Ellis topic, when a guy misses a season due to injury, it has a to be a major one. He may not want to have surgery but I don't know that many situations where a player has lost time like he has and avoided it. The Flyers medical staff isn't known for doing well with their diagnoses. I can easily see him coming into camp and going down again missing another season or so in the process. Fortunately the club has developed enough defensemen (Sanheim, Provorov, York, Ristolainen, Zamula, Attard, and Hogberg) that, with proper usage, the club could work around the loss of Ellis. LTIR and Ellis are probably going to be linked together for a long time.

VoteForKalas 2022-05-02 12:14:18 UTC #1157

It has been a money making machine for a long time for Comcast, but since the pandemic started supposedly they have lost money. My hope is, like the 76ers, they will eventually realize hockey also does not fit in their business model and sell it.

VoteForKalas 2022-05-02 12:22:54 UTC #1158

You're right, I'm sure Clarke and Homer lobbied behind the scenes against Hextall, but Scott and Comcast made the final decision and did the deed. Hextall was brought in because of his work with the LA Kings hoping he could replicate their success, but I never saw him as one of the good ole Flyer boys like Clarke, the ringleader, and Homer, the good soldier, were. Hextall has always been too much of his own man for that crew, especially Clarke who equates independent thought that conflicts with his guidance as personal disloyalty.

zambonir 2022-05-02 14:56:06 UTC #1159

For sure, Hexy was the best of both worlds, a free thinker and a legacy, though the overlap between the Kings and the Flyers was so heavy (Lombardi, John Stevens) that I don't know if there was truly a different set of values/insight to be gleaned from there. And of course Scott and Comcast are ultimately responsible - and so is Hextall for that matter, he obviously should have been able to read the office politics better and his rebuild didn't exactly work out even if they undercut him - but it really sounded like he could have kept his job if he'd just sucked up to those guys more. And that's something only a new owner can fix for sure.

I don't know that the Flyers were ever a revenue machine for Comcast, more like a synergy machine. The Sixers should have been too but clearly not so much that it made sense to keep it when nobody wanted to run it (still a shame really, arguably Croce was the best steward of either team over the last 20+ years). The question is what value do the Flyers really add to the Comcast brand - as programming, as a way to get people to subscribe, etc. - at this point? Especiallly now that NBC is out of the national hockey business too. Comcast Spectacor could also sell the team while retaining the arena (including the parking), which presumably makes more money than the team itself, though that would be a much less attractive deal for someone. Also still looming is the Sixers wanting their own buildiing.

Similar media sports team owners - the Ducks, the Dodgers - got out long ago. Liberty presumably does make a ton of money on the Braves but they obviously have figured out how to hire good people and let them do their jobs (even when they were cheating).

VoteForKalas 2022-05-02 17:54:50 UTC #1160

It was not a real rebuild, TPTB wanted the appearance of a rebuild without the reality of one. This would get the fans/media off their backs for the immediate future, they could market around the new Flyers coming, keep the seats full, continue the merchandise flowing and cash those playoff checks. Never one thought was given to the feasibility of the plan or backup strategies if things went sideways. Hextall was tasked with rebuilding while winning which was impossible with the state of the franchise when he took over.

Hextall has fault for your other point; not understanding the internal politics and finding ways to placate people enough without disrupting what he was trying hard to accomplish. One could argue he should never have accepted the position, but he had never been a GM and likely very much wanted to reach that level.

Comcast finally tired of Hextall and the process and they fired him. It was the public acknowledgement of what many already knew: it was not a serious rebuild and now the Flyers were going back to their old ways. They hired Fletcher and the rest of the drain circling story is history. The franchise is not in as bad shape as when Hextall arrived, but the fans & media have largely abandoned them and their rep league-wide is pretty low. FA are not coming here unless we pay top dollar and we cannot seem to develop talent to save our lives.

The Flyers value as of December 2021 is $1.2B. Comcast bought the majority stake in 1996 for $150M. That is a pretty damn good return on investment. That does include the facilities etc. that you mentioned. I do not believe Comcast would have kept it this long, especially after getting rid of the 76ers earlier, if it was not making good money for them every year. Yes, there was loyalty to Snider and the legacy of the Flyers, but cold hard business logic usually trumps all.

Here is an interesting revenue chart for the Flyers from 2005-2021. 2008 & 2010 were good playoff runs yet the highest revenue numbers show up as the team's performance declines. The renovations to the WFC were announced in 2014 and started in 2016. As we can also see, the pandemic led to a significant drop in revenue and I'm not sure if they have recovered previous levels since.

zambonir 2022-05-02 18:29:55 UTC #1161

It was not a real rebuild, agreed, but the drafting and developing also wound up being really poor. Trying to go for it the past few years even as that had already and was still happening, only made it worse of course.

Making the playoffs in 2016 was especially misguided, if also probably Ed Snider's dying wish.

The similarities to the Phillies are pretty stark!

VoteForKalas 2022-05-02 21:16:16 UTC #1162

I agree with everything except the drafting. Hextall got talent like Hart, Provorov, Konecny, Sanheim, Farabee, Lindblom, Frost etc. They showed promise & production early, but after he got fired they have almost all gone in the tank. Talent development is really the achilles heel for the Flyers just like the Phillies. Since I started following them as a kid in 1974, they've had that issue, but never worse than now.

zambonir 2022-05-02 22:05:26 UTC #1163

Well, I don't think you can separate the two, or draw a direct line from Hextall leaving to the players cratering. A lot of it is on the NHL coaching staff too of course. But the Hakstol and Vigneault eras wound up being pretty similar. I have not followed the lower level front office turnover closely. I mean, Chris Pryor was a big firing at the same time as Hextall, but he also was a Flyers lifer. My recollection is he got a lot of credit for the good drafting (i.e. Richards Carter Giroux) but didn't do quite as well (we can say now) in more recent years.

Whether they have a clue about, well, anything right now, who knows (or rather, no). I assume Briere is the next president or GM; wonder who will be Fletcher's last coaching hire?