The New Unending Flyers thread

zambonir 2024-09-26 17:49:56 UTC #1064

The NHLPA has filed a grievance on behalf of Ryan Johansen regarding the Philadelphia Flyers’ decision to terminate his contract.
— NHLPA ( @NHLPA ) September 26, 2024

Florida_Sunshine 2024-09-26 18:13:31 UTC #1065

And now Kolosov is on his way. I imagine the Flyers made a commitment to him that if he doesn't make the big squad, he goes back to KHL on loan for another year? With the recent signing, it looks like we have too many goalies to fairly evaluate and why not let him further develop elsewhere?

Docs 2024-09-26 18:17:44 UTC #1066

They have dead money tied up with Kevin Hayes, Cam Atkinson for two years and one more for Tony DeAngelo. They have money tied up with Cal Petersen this year and as you said three more years of Ryan Ellis restricting their off season flexibility because his cap hit can only get relief during the season. Before they cut Johansen they had less than $1M in cap space. The could have dumped all of these guys along with draft picks if they wanted to be active in the free agent market. It was smart to wait it out. Having Ellis allows them to take on salary with draft picks in trades every year.

zambonir 2024-09-26 19:00:53 UTC #1067

Yes but none of that dead money was acquired in trade besides Peterson (and Johansen). Obviously it would have been insane to start paying other teams in draft picks to take those guys, not that they didn't try to move them.

They clearly just would have preferred Kolosov to be in the Flyers system, and also available as the first call-up instead of Petersen (and now the new signing). I guess in the end it just means either Kolosov or Fedotov gets traded a year from now (or sooner).

Florida_Sunshine 2024-09-26 21:36:26 UTC #1068

Peterson only has a year left so he will not be around for long. Lots of other guys in the mix so this should spur good competition. Can you imagine if we still had Hart at a big salary?

bkeich 2024-09-26 21:43:54 UTC #1069

Sorry if I seem impatient with this build (it is not a rebuild, there is no re- to it). When a franchise that plays in a league that half the teams go to the playoffs and you miss 4 years in a row and only get to the 2nd round once in 12 years it seems like an eternally bad plan.

Now we seem to be stuck in the mud with an extremely unlikeable coach. Year after year the story is the same, we are building, we hope to compete in 3-4 years. We hope (futile) that this is the season we sneak into the playoffs. I guarantee if you look back 3-4 years in this thread you will see we are building to be a power in 23, 24, etc.

Hoping to be in the middle of the league year after year is very frustrating.

Florida_Sunshine 2024-09-26 21:48:27 UTC #1070

Nothing wrong with your attitude. Some people enjoy watching something build and go on to be successful. Others only like to be around during the good years and have no patience with a rebuild. Good thing there are plenty of teams and sports to follow. At least you have the Phillies, Eagles and Sixers. Are you aligned with any other sports towns?

bkeich 2024-09-26 21:57:45 UTC #1071

I don’t mind watching the build, but when we are in year 13 of it….

I loved watching the tanking Sixers because you could see the pieces growing. Watching a young Embiid and Simmons (and even the years before them) was a lot of fun.

Maybe watching a young Michkov will be fun, I just don’t like that we have basically stalled HOPING that he is a great player. It is too much pressure on a guy that may take 5 years to develop.

Florida_Sunshine 2024-09-26 22:11:33 UTC #1072

You realize we would have been in the playoffs last year if not for giving up a valuable Dman for a draft pick?

I can certainly see how this team is building.

Florida_Sunshine 2024-09-26 22:12:24 UTC #1073

I think you will be surprised. I expect this team to be fun to watch.

bkeich 2024-09-27 01:39:11 UTC #1074

Michkov picks up his first goal of the preseason (empty net). He does have 3 assists in 3 games.

zambonir 2024-09-27 02:13:26 UTC #1075

I just things are obviously better than they were two years ago and I say that as someone who wasn't especially excited about the front office hires. Torts I actually like/think is a good coach who has exceeded my expectations in terms of both W-L and being able to shepherd young players and a rebuild.

Don't think too much of ownership until proven otherwise (with Hilferty, Comcast is what it is) but they're not worse than the Sixers owners. Sixers just got lucky and hit on one generational talent (if hitting once out of five-eight times is actualy lucky) whereas Flyers wound up being unlucky the one year they got lucky (Patrick) and then again with the one great lower pick they did make (Hart).

I think the team will be fun to watch too.

If MIchkov takes five years then yes, he's a bust and so is the rebuild. He should be a key piece by 2027 and the team should be good by then too.

I guess being a Phillies fan has made it easier to endure this. Hextal was Klentak. Hakstol was Kapler. They thought they were ready to change and rebuild but they weren't. Phillies were able to spend their way into staying above .500 and got lucky w/ a great hire twice (when it did not look like they'd do either initially, Dombrowski and several others initially turned them down and Thomson was practically an accident). Flyers' great misfortune under the last regime was to actually succeed for one year where the Girardi Phillies never did, prompting the follly of staying the course/doubling down (and saving Fletcher's job for too long).

Austinfan 2024-09-27 15:28:04 UTC #1076

Flyers have never rebuilt, Hextall was given the green light in 2014 and traded Kimmo and Coburn at the TDL, then other than a few minor deals did nothing (signing Weise?) until summer of 2017 when he traded B Schenn then signed JVR (talk about cognitive dissonance)..

Holmgren fired Hextall in 2018 and hired Fletcher and AV with a "win now" mandate, so Fletcher traded for Braun and Niskanen and signed Hayes. After 2020 AV wanted Voracek and Ghost gone, then bailed when the team imploded. Instead of rebuilding, same old one step forward, two steps back b/c Scott refused to accept the need to rebuild. So Fletcher trades a 1st and 2nd for Risto, then G at TDL for Tippett and 1st and 3rd, followed by 2nd, 3rd, & 4th for TDA and a big contract extension for Risto. Cognitive dissonance once again.

Hiring Torts was perceived as a "win now" move, but turned out to be the key to a real rebuild. Torts declared the "emperor had no clothes" and that the team needed to rebuild and it might take longer than his 4 year contract. Result was the firing of Fletcher and Scott being replaced by Hilferty.

Briere is rebuilding, not tanking like some would like. Traded Provorov and took cap dump (Peterson) for 1st, (2) 2nds, Grans and Walker. Then flipped Walker and took another salary dump (Johansen) to get another 1st. Traded the FLA (#32) to Edmonton for another 1st in 2025. Forced to move Gauthier (exact details of conflict still unknown) got 2nd and Drysdale.

2025 draft, 1st - Flyers, Colorado, Edmonton, 2nd - Flyers, Anaheim, CBJ.
Odds are they'll end up with 5 picks in the top 40 plus their 2nd, so lot's of ammunition to target players in the 1st rd after pick 10 or so (very hard to trade into top 10)

Michkov is going to be a 100 point player in 2-3 years, he's that good.
Bonk, Luchanko, two top goalie prospects in Bjarnason and Zavragin, bunch of other prospects like Barkey, Bump et al.
12 starters this season (out of 20) will be 25 and under.

No guarantee of success, but most sustained effort to build around a young core in decades.

2025

zambonir 2024-09-27 15:35:44 UTC #1077

And that's probably where your next big move comes from, trading a couple of those five picks for another Tippett or Drysdale type (but more advanced than either were at the time of those trades).

You are correct that Torts deserve more credit than we give him for giving Comcast a wake-up call at a time when nobody else - Briere included as a mere assistant or consultant or whatever he was - had credibility.

Austinfan 2024-09-27 15:44:08 UTC #1078

Yeah. Basically they have to come out of the 2025 draft, whether prospects or a young upcoming player, with another center and a top 4 LHD. At that point the roster is pretty much set for a while.

They're not going to be top heavy like Toronto (one 2nd rd in 8 years), Edmonton (finally got to the SC finals with the best player in the league) or NJ. For that approach to work, you have to have a GM who can fill out a roster on the cheap.

They're going to have to be more like the Blues or Caps (one big star and a bunch of good players) or currently Carolina and Dallas. Build a deep talented group and have a couple players raise their game.

If they can develop a top young goalie tandem, they can compete at a high level for an extend period, see Bruins, FLA (when Bob is "on") or the Rangers.

Whatever path an organization chooses, execution is the difference, no one has had more top picks than Buffalo or experienced more futility.

VoteForKalas 2024-09-27 19:40:17 UTC #1079

This is wrong. Hextall was tasked with retooling on the fly while winning at the NHL level. This was not new for the Flyers; that is what they had done for decades and always wondered why it stopped working once the salary cap was introduced and their money advantage in landing FA/making trades was negated.

Hextall focused on the draft, trying to create a talent pipeline from scratch (the Flyers cupboard was bare when he arrived) and then made moves on the NHL level to bridge to when that talent would start arriving and becoming the new core of the team.

The difference now is that Snider is dead, Comcast has stepped back from the hockey operations, Clarke & Holmgren have finally been sidelined, people with a much better sense of how hockey works now were finally put in charge and a real rebuild was begun. Torts helps as well as coach because he understands how to develop talent which was always a huge failing in the past.

zambonir 2024-09-27 21:22:52 UTC #1080

I stand by my Hextall as Klentak idea. He had the mandate and the right idea, he just wound up being bad at many aspects of the job (including the draft, but also just management skills in general). The one year he tried to make the playoffs because they were in it and Mr. Snider was still alive was an error just like 2018 was for the Phillies. In the end when it took too long, both men's poor political instincts and inability to work well with others - even when some of the others didn't deserve to be heeded - got them canned. The Flyers still had to go through the whole failed Fletcher and Vigneault era to wake up; Middleton got luckier with the hiring of Dombrowski and his much more open-minded approach to remaking the front office (and then fixing Middleton's other mistake, Girardi).

VoteForKalas 2024-09-28 15:45:34 UTC #1081

Hextall, like all Flyers GMs, had the mandate to win. That was the only mandate he had.

He was expected to build a winner.

The problem was the team was mediocre, the farm system was barren and they had precious little cap space to work with.

Hextall argued for what I think 99% of any other GMs would have in that situation. What is the best way to add more talented players on cheap contracts and improve the team's chances of winning? The draft and rebuilding their prospect pool. He wanted to rebuild over a number of years. He'd been part of the group that had done it successfully in LA and knew there were no shortcuts.

Flyers ownership and management said no. You're expected to win at the NHL level. You can retool through the draft all you want, but you'll be judged on how the Flyers perform. He should have walked away since it was an impossible mission, but he wanted to be a GM, loved the Flyers and wanted to do what he could to make it work.

It worked out as expected; he did what he could, but the inherent contradictions in trying to win while rebuilding eventually broke the process. He was blamed and fired. Flyers ownership and management said the rebuild failed and the fans would not support more of this failure. They did not admit they never allowed a rebuild to occur and put Hextall and the team in an impossible situation, but fans knew who was really at fault.

Once Fletcher was hired and put in the equally impossible situation of win at all costs, the fan base threw up their hands. Attendance fell, interest in the team dropped, any media coverage was mainly mockery of the organization and money was lost as Fletcher failed even worse than Hextall and the Flyers became truly irrelevant.

Comcast finally realized they were at a fork in the road; to continue on the current path led to selling the Flyers at a low and moving on since it had become a non-value asset in their portfolio. The only way to avoid that was to engage in the true rebuild they had needed for decades. Briere, Jones, Torts & Co. have the best chance to turn this franchise around that I've seen since Lindros left. It will still be very difficult and they need to show progress soon to keep the mandate, but it does seem to be real this time.

Austinfan 2024-09-28 17:06:22 UTC #1082

Actually, that's no how I remember it.

Snidger gave Hextall the green light to rebuild, he started with the Coburn and Kimmo TDL trades, then a few to clear cap room, Pronger, Vinnie, etc.

I think what happened was Mason got them to the playoffs in 2015-16 and Hextall was fooled (this went on until 2020, goalie has good season, they get to the playoffs, next year, goalies implode). After they fell back, he realized the rebuilding wasn't finished, traded Schenn, got lucky with the Patrick pick and unlucky with Patrick. When they won in 2017-18, he went out and signed JVR. Then the goalies imploded again and he got fired.

When Fletcher game in, it was both his deals but Hart getting red hot that carried the team in 2019-20. Then Hart imploded, Niskanen retired, and AV reacted by pushing Fletcher to get rid of Voracek and Ghost. After 2020-21, the aging of the talent base, and the failure of Patrick, Myers, and draft pick misses kept the cupboard bare.

The real problem was Hextall never committed to rebuilding, and Holmgren wanted to make a push before G, Voracek, Simmonds etc aged out. So a lost decade.

zambonir 2024-09-28 17:26:53 UTC #1083

There's some truth to both of what you're saying. I still say giving Snider one last playoff run instead of going into full rebuild mode with the '15-'16 team is what slowed the aggressiveness Hextall might have preferred. They still stayed the course for one season but the '17-'18 team made the playoffs and and then came the early '18 purge.

As we saw with the Phillies, it's not just the incompetence and instransigence of the old guard and the higher-ups, it's having the ability to sell your plan, change minds, and make change. That's what both Klentak and Hextall couldn't do. The different since then is the Phillies were both deeper in talent and luckier in their next hire, and in an uncapped sport, so at a time when many of us thought another rebuild was inevitable (and hated that the Phillies had hired a win-now president) they pulled it off.