Ah, the halcyon days of early 2020.
The Philadelphia Flyers were in the midst of a 19-6-1 run that had taken them from bubble playoff contention to lock and borderline contender status. Chuck Fletcher and Alain Vigneault had near-universal approval within the fan base. Ron Hextall’s stockpiling of young talent had gone so seemingly well that less than a year later, the Pittsburgh Penguins would hire him as their new GM to — at least in part — replicate what he had done in Philadelphia. And of course, terms like COVID-19 and pandemic and shutdown were barely even on the radar as Flyers fans reveled in their club’s regained relevancy.
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I was confident that the Flyers were poised to establish themselves as a yearly Stanley Cup threat. Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
"Take a deep breath, Flyers fans. Try to shake off the less-than-stellar playoffs. There's every reason to believe more and better runs are on the horizon."@charlieo_conn counters the negative prevailing thoughts about the team with reasons for optimism: https://t.co/STaWejp81J
— The Athletic Philadelphia (@TheAthleticPHI) September 10, 2020
In fairness, I wasn’t the only one who believed that the Flyers had finally turned the corner in 2019-20, even with the pandemic putting a halt to their clear momentum for four months. In May 2020, the average “organizational health” score in our Flyers fan survey came back at 4.15 (on a 1-5 scale) and 81.9 percent of responders ranked their confidence in Fletcher in the 4 or 5 range. What’s most shocking to see now is that 76.1 percent of participants in the survey believed that the Flyers would win the Stanley Cup within the next five years.
That almost certainly isn’t going to happen.
So how were we all so wrong about the future of the Flyers? Looking back, it really boils down to three factors that I failed to anticipate or recognize.
The Vigneault fit
In September 2020, Vigneault finished second in Jack Adams voting, narrowly losing the award to Boston’s Bruce Cassidy. There was every reason to believe that the Flyers had found their head coach, one capable of not just harnessing the team’s talent, but elevating it.
A little over a year later, he was gone, after presiding over two consecutive severely disappointing campaigns. Vigneault’s presence not only failed to improve the team — it was making things worse.
I never expected that player/coach relations would sour so quickly.
In retrospect, my best guess is that some of the fractures between individual players and Vigneault — specifically in the case of Jakub Voracek and Shayne Gostisbehere — went all the way back to 2019-20 and became even more prevalent in the summer bubble. But it wasn’t until the heavily compressed 2020-21 campaign that the knives really came out and helped to precipitate the team’s rapid fall out of playoff contention.
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The hope on Fletcher’s part was that significant roster changes plus a full summer for everyone to cool off would be enough to salvage the situation entering 2021-22. But when things went bad again in November, it was over. Vigneault had “lost the room.” By the time he was fired in early December, the Flyers’ playoff chances were basically nil. Two consecutive seasons had been lost, in no small part due to the fact that Vigneault couldn’t get his club on the same page.
It’s understandable that Fletcher didn’t detect just how concerning fissures might have been after the 2020 playoffs. But it was an unforgivable error in retrospect that he stuck with Vigneault after 2020-21. Unlike us in the media, who didn’t have the benefit of locker room access that season (due to pandemic protocols) to fully intuit just how much the player/coach relationship had devolved, Fletcher was right there. Sure, it would have been controversial to can Vigneault just months removed from being a Jack Adams finalist. But given that he ended up having to fire Vigneault anyway just two months into 2021-22, it would have been the right move.
Instead, given the choice between team and coach in the summer of 2021, Fletcher picked his coach, and delivered a busy offseason worth of moves intended to “shake things up” yet ultimately made the roster weaker. Ryan Ellis played only four games. Rasmus Ristolainen was underwhelming at best. Statistically, Keith Yandle was the worst defenseman in the NHL. Derick Brassard was fine until he got hurt. Nate Thompson was not fine, and then he got hurt. The Cam Atkinson trade mostly worked, but it’s fair to wonder if that move would have even needed to happen at all if Fletcher had chosen to move on from Vigneault, who Voracek had clashed with repeatedly.
This season was over before it began; the Flyers just didn’t have the talent to contend for anything. But the 2020-21 squad was still very deep and intentionally meant to “run it back” from a year that saw the Flyers get within one win of the NHL’s final four. The 2021-22 club — at least at the start — still had Claude Giroux, Sean Couturier, Travis Konecny and Carter Hart. Knowing what we know now about Konecny and Hart based on this season, that really should have been enough talent to keep the Flyers at least in the playoff race — and maybe would have been, had the Flyers refurbished the coaching staff in the summer of 2021 rather than the roster.
Young players didn’t develop/weren’t good enough
One of the leading causes for optimism surrounding the Flyers in 2020 was centered around the heaps of quality under-25 talent either already with the big club or on its way.
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Carter Hart. Travis Konecny. Ivan Provorov. Joel Farabee. Nolan Patrick. Travis Sanheim. Oskar Lindblom. Philippe Myers.
Surely the Flyers were going to get at least a couple of star-level talents out of that crew, and then a bunch of guys the next tier down, right?
Let’s go through how it played out for all of them over the next three years.
Hart — who had just established himself as an above-average NHL starter at age 21 and thrived in the playoffs — fell apart in 2020-21, and is just now returning to where he was in 2019-20. Konecny also dealt with two consecutive down seasons before finally proving that 2019-20 wasn’t a fluke. Provorov regressed dramatically, and now barely looks like a top-pair quality NHL defenseman. Myers doesn’t even look like an NHL-quality defenseman, period. Patrick and Lindblom both returned in 2020-21 after their health issues, but were shells of their previous selves and look unlikely to ever get back there (Patrick may never even play again). Farabee and Sanheim have bounced between good (but not elite) campaigns and truly disappointing ones.
There’s your exciting U25 group. Welp.
Now, there are a lot of factors that went into their failure to progress into the types of players that the Flyers needed. For Hart and Konecny, perhaps poor coaching played a role, given their respective resurgences in 2022-23. Provorov was clearly hurt by team-building failures; namely, the inability to replace Matt Niskanen after his retirement post-2020 bubble. The issues with the team’s medical approach — which the organization finally began to revamp in the summer of 2021 — may have been part of it.
But there’s one other plausible explanation: I simply overrated the quality of many of the Flyers’ top young players in 2020.
Maybe Hart — despite his historically rare success for his age — is destined to top out merely as a good NHL starter, not a game-changer. Provorov’s apparent breakout was apparently driven less by maturation and more just Niskanen turning the clock back one last time. I was too optimistic about the possibility of Patrick and Lindblom returning as viable contributors. I underestimated the degree to which Myers’ lack of hockey IQ would prevent him from developing into a viable top-four blueliner. I thought Sanheim was ready to step into a role as one of the league’s best No. 3s, and that Farabee would use his promising rookie season as a springboard into the Flyers’ top six.
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With basically all of the team’s U25 talents topping out about one or two tiers below where I expected they would ultimately fall, it’s little surprise the Flyers of 2023 are far worse than I assumed they would be. I’ll take ownership of that misread.
But there’s another factor here that undeniably played a role in where the Flyers stand for which I refuse to accept any culpability.
Plain old horrific luck
No one wanted to hear it over the past three years. But man oh man, the Flyers have had just about every possible thing break against them since 2020.
The injuries, of course, lead the way.
Yes, every player comes with an injury risk. Every surgery has a percentage possibility that it might not take. And while I do believe the organizational medical issues were real, for the Flyers over the last three years, every player with an injury red flag (and many who didn’t) got injured. Surgeries didn’t work. Not having surgeries didn’t work. The Flyers became a team of worst-case scenarios.
And the result was that key players either lost their effectiveness for seasons, or their careers as a whole.
- Nolan Patrick: career ruined by injury
- Ryan Ellis: career ruined by injury
- Kevin Hayes: two seasons spoiled by injury
- Sean Couturier: two seasons spoiled by injury
- Joel Farabee: one season spoiled by injury
- Cam Atkinson: one season (at least) spoiled by injury
I’m sorry — no one is going to be able to predict all of that.
And it wasn’t even like the Flyers could backfill the holes with their prospect depth, because most of them got hurt all at the same time as well. Morgan Frost lost most of a season to a shoulder injury; so did Tyson Foerster. Bobby Brink missed most of 2022-23. Wade Allison and Tanner Laczynski had their development paths delayed. Sam Ersson had to sit out the majority of 2021-22. And they weren’t the only ones. Everyone in the organization was getting hurt, whether they were around the Flyers facilities or far far away.
The bad luck wasn’t limited to injuries, however. Niskanen’s retirement was unexpected and in retrospect, helped kill the viability of the 2020-21 run-it-back plan. Hart’s mental health struggles that season played a major role in that as well. Lindblom’s cancer diagnosis removed one of the team’s few big late-round hits from the equation, and significantly hurt their depth.
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Every team deals with bad luck on occasion, of course. But when making predictions about the future, one can only account for a reasonable amount. Not whatever the Flyers suffered through over the last few campaigns.
(Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)A perfect storm
So why was I so wrong about the Flyers’ future back in 2020?
It really took a perfect storm of awful. All of the major issues were interconnected, to the point where it’s difficult to fully separate them from each other.
There were bad front office decisions, which in 2020 and 2021 largely centered around trusting the coaching staff too much. Fletcher largely sat on his hands in the 2020 offseason, believing that Vigneault and his staff could replicate their 2019-20 success. When they failed to do so, he blamed the roster, and ended up having to fire the coach anyway. Another lost season in 2021-22 led to Giroux’s exit, and in tandem with Couturier’s injury and the stalled development of Hart, Konecny and Provorov, left the Flyers with little in the way of impact talent entering 2022-23.
Which leads us to the bad development of young players. Konecny and Hart ultimately got back on track, but not after spending two seasons delivering far less on-ice value than they had in 2019-20. Provorov never did. And then, the entire second tier — Sanheim, Patrick, Lindblom, Myers, Frost, even Farabee — underwhelmed as well. Was that due to coaching or that those players just weren’t as good as they originally seemed to be? The answer is probably a little bit of both.
And then, there’s bad luck, which also played a role. Very few organizations would have been able to survive the deluge of injuries the Flyers dealt with from 2019 to 2023. Their best season in nearly a decade was prematurely ended due to the pandemic. Key players unexpectedly retired or were forced into early retirement. One even got cancer and never was the same on the ice afterward. Not exactly an easily predictable situation.
It’s not difficult to imagine an alternate universe where the Flyers do build off where they seemed to stand in 2020. Maybe they go on a long playoff run absent the pandemic, and Vigneault builds up enough cachet in the locker room as a result to avoid a later mutiny. In a more normal 2020-21 campaign, perhaps this year’s versions of Konecny and Hart show up to support Giroux and Couturier, while Niskanen sticks it out for one more season to boost Provorov. Enthused by yet another solid playoff showing, Giroux re-signs in the summer of 2021 to a sweetheart deal under the cap, setting the Flyers up to justify paying the necessary assets in the summer of 2022 to add Johnny Gaudreau to the mix. Without injuries to stunt their development, players like Farabee, Frost, Foerster, Allison and Ersson are all ready to be significant middle-of-the-lineup contributors in 2022-23, to support healthy veterans like Hayes (who never had core muscle issues) and Lindblom (who quickly returned to pre-cancer form).
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But that’s not the universe we live in. In this one, my prediction that the Flyers were poised for a run of extended success heading into the heart of the 2020s couldn’t have been more wrong.
(Photo: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)
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