King Knut

I think it was because it looked effortless. People thought he was lazy. They didn’t watch him play defense. they didn’t understand his value. you're absolutely right about the finals and the scoring. neither Team had a good goalie. The blackhawks has a healthy one. That ended up being the difference.

I'd suggest that's worth a try if they don't trade him.

People love to hate on him, but he was the Flyer getting votes for the Hart and the Selke those years.

How were the Bruins medium? Because of where they finished on the year? They won the cup the next season and their roster wasn't that different. They key players are still there now and they're still superior. The Habs were the other "surprise" team, but they had to beat the president's trophy winning caps and the defending champ penguins. They were on arguably just as hot a streak as the Flyers. The Flyers system and aggressive forecheck simply matched up much much better against them than any other team the Flyers faced that year. About the only thing you can say about the path to the finals for the Flyers that year is that on paper, they were much better than the record that they snuck into the playoffs on.

I don't think anyone was saying this at the beginning of the season. In hindsight it looks like that because of what the Hawks did, but they hadn't done it yet. That Flyers team was EXTREMELY strong going into the season. They had a ton of trouble early (likely because Pronger didn't like Stevens) and gelled around Christmas. a few weeks after Lavvy came in. Looking at the finals they were fairly evenly matched. Yes, The Hawks top line was much more skilled, but the FLyers were deeper at forward (and it showed). They were also likely better on Defense but their top guys were also older and that showed by game 6 as well. In the end, I think it's pretty clear that it came down to the goalies. None of them were good, but Niemi managed to save a few more of the easy ones than either Boosh or Leighton did... probably because Boosh and Leighton were both playing hurt (though no one knew Leighton was hurt at the time... he didn't admit it until it was over). The blackhawks took off and only got better from there and the Flyers fell apart internally until their GM decided to lose his mind and ruined the team while simultaneously putting them in unescapable cap hell. The Blackhawks did the same, but they won a bunch of cups for their efforts.

I'd consider this, especially if the Blue Jackets continue to slide without Jones. We'll see as we have a home and home against them next week that will pretty much decide their fate and possibly ours. If the Flyers can't rebound and take 3 of the next 4 games, they may have to start considering selling what they can.

I agree with this, but I'd even go as far as to say that if any of our goalies hadn't gone down with injuries, we would have won the cup. Remember, Boucher got hurt during the Boston series and Leighton got hurt (apparently) in game one of the finals. Laviolette was juggling injured goalies through the finals. and it showed. People act like the Blackhawks were just far and away the superior team because of Kane and Toews and Keith, but in the end, Niemi, as mediocre as he was, was healthy and made the saves.

Well strap in tight because apparently these Jeff Carter rumors won't go away. Jay Bow's contract is up at the end of the season anyway, so St. Louis may just be happy to hold out and make due until Free Agency. I didn't bother looking, but Schenner's got a new contract from that that starts next year and goes to the end of time, so he's right out. Otherwise, I'd be happy to have him back considering we have no idea what the hell will happen with Patrick. A lot of GMs will be looking at Ghost too. It still hurts me too... but the guy was playing on two broken feet. I'm not going to hang him for it. At least he told the trainers and the coach (unlike Leaky Leighton who just played with a slipped disc and didn't tell anyone)

Well they've certainly made dumber trades in the past

To the team most likely to overtake the 8th playoff spot from us?

So's Jay Bouwmeester in St. Louis. Might be his career. Do we want Schenner back? Montreal is a team that has regularly dressed Nick Cousins, Jordan Weal and Dale Weise this season. Do we really think they're going to send us Domi or Gallagher for Ghost? The BLues have a lot of centers on their roster. If Patrick is actually coming back, it may be moot, but I don't think we're likely to get a good idea on him until after the deadline anyway.

For some reason I thought that was a one year deal to get him to play. My bad! I don't care for Hall and I don't want to overpay for the others past their usefullness (again). I like ironing out a trade for Kapanen or Johnson, or another similarly contracted player or RFA. Toronto will want Myers or Sanheim, but Toronto might not be in such a great bargaining position when they miss the playoffs and go into the off season with one D man under contract. And I don't mean it has to be GHost... but it's probably Ghost plus or Hagg plus MORE.

UFA's this summer are big and they will be expensive: Taylor Hall & Mikko Rantanen will both fetch $10million. Mikko is likely worth it. Taylor not so much. For the Flyers that means unloading JVR and Ghost. Next tier includes Ryan Hugent Hopkins and Mike Hoffman. They're both likely in the 8 million range at least. I wouldn't mind a guy like Chris Kreider and we've already talked about Toffoli and Pageau, but they're all in that range we know so well where they're going to make too much money too far past their peek years with their next contracts... but they are kinda what the team needs most I think.

I don't believe Homer had any idea what he was doing. I reallly don't. My most generous guess is that snider really was pulling strings without Homer knowing. Either that or Homer really did have a stroke in 2012. Richards was likely a burgeoning pill addict before he left and he likely became one by doing things like going through the playoffs with two shoulder tears and stuff like that. I couldn't believe when Lombardi tried to get out of his contract without any kind of a payoff because it literally opened the Kings and the Flyers up to a very dangerous, public and ugly legal battle. This is likely why the whole thing was quietly handled out of the headlines. Both teams were likely guilty (and probably still are) of over prescribing and making way too available the likes of the kind of Oxy that Richards get stopped with. My guess is that if had never been traded and was still the team captain in Philly, there would likely have been closer tabs being kept on him and his treatment. As it was in LA, he was important to their success, but not their star. All that aside, I would gladly take a washed up, Pill addicted Richards at 27 if it meant winning two Stanley Cups in between. Wouldn't you? He wasn't even making 6 million. Besides, they could have bought him out instead of Bryz and Briere if he wasn't paying dividends. That's not hindsight either, it was pretty well known there would be complicity buyouts offered well before that CBA was inked. Anyway, I'm not here to re-litigate those trades, I just think trading them was a move toward rebuilding and signing Bryz was not. What Hextall did with Simmer was amazing and almost criminal and what he did with Schenn was fantastic for both teams in the end... but again... the Flyers "win" a trade where the other team wins a cup. Kinda sick of trying to sell myself that scenario. The Flyers definitively destroyed in the Richards trade though. Jake and Coots for Carter is an utterly fantastic return. No matter what anyone says about his time in Philly, if you watched the Kings win those cups, you know full well that Carter was also huge in those cup teams for the Kings and is still one of their key players, but if you guys hate Jake as much as you do, imagine if you were still watching Jeff Carter. You'd all be dead of hate fueled heart attacks by now. Most teams in this league could use a consistent scorer. The Flyers aren't likely to get a decent scorer in FA. There simply isn't the cap room. They can't trade Hayes for a few years (have to protect him in the Seattle draft too). The best option would be to try to trade JVR before UFA season opens. That's not as crazy as it sounds actually. The fact of the matter is there's an expansion draft coming that JVR can be exposed for and if they don't lockout, there are likely complicity buyouts coming with the new CBA. So a team trading for JVR could consider him essentially having 1-2 years remaining on his contract instead of 3. Of course JVR is on pace for 24 goals again this year, so you have to make sure you get someone who will do better than that and any team that can afford to pay JVR 7million could also likely take a crack at the same player. Which brings us back to Ghost. I really think I like the Johnson / Kapanen idea.

Too bad he has a 3 year NMC and limited NTC after that.

The Giroux era was screwed from the beginning. I think we assume it starts with the Richards and Carter trades and that's when Homer essentially ruined the team for the next 6 years. There was a snowball's chance at the borders of hell with Pronger, but when he went down, everything between then and now was inevitable.

I mean can you blame him? All he did was kick butt, promise to get even better and we traded him and his RFA contract to Columbus. COLUMBUS. These next 8 games will pretty much decide the season. The good news is that this time last year, the Flyers needed to win 3/4 of the games and everyone else needed to essentially lose at least a majority of their games. This year if the Flyers keep winning at the pace they're at, they should be in good shape. These teams are all going to start playing each other more now too. It would help if they stopped going to OT as much, but that seems to be the way of the NHL and the Metro these days. This is going to be a huge challenge and we can't get too down on them if they lose one or two, but if they pull out 2/3-3/4 of them, they'll be doing what they need to.

They're 7-2-1 in their last ten. They keep winning, and I will baaah all the way to the playoffs while y'all keep whining about ghost captains and goals and needing help on offense. Their only goal is to win games. They are executing a very specific plan of how to do that. It's working. They're playing AV's game and it's working. I think it's great and intelligent and totally legit to be concerned about them being able to break out and score big goals when the team really needs it. Right now, they're working on their system... the idea behind which is very simply to not need that big goal. Let's see if they can execute against the Devils. Then comes the biggest 7 games stretch of the season. Likely the stretch of games that will decide if they make it to the playoffs or not. Rubber meets the road then, but I genuinely look at the last few games and see a team working on the fundamental of its system gearing up for that stretch. If you look at the last three games, even the Penguins game, they've controlled large swaths of play in the game. Most of the goals against them have been either kind of flukey or due to someone specific blowing coverage or missing a clear. That's their goal. Not to out score in a free for all. Their goal is to control these games. They look like they're getting good at it. Next week stuff gets real.

This is no doubt true, but I can almost guarantee you, what we're seeing right now is Claude prioritizing exactly what AV is asking him to prioritize.

I think you missed my point. They're winning. They're currently on pace for 100 points. Usually my measure of a captain (especially of a somewhat talented team) is whether they're winning. They're winning. He's doing his job. I want goals, you want goals, I'm sure he wants goals. I want wins more and I think he's doing what the coach wants him to.

I think this is a pretty big thing. The other thing to keep in mind is that the PP has been awful and he's still (mostly) playing absolutely out of position there too. I still contend that if they fixed the PP, we wouldn't be so worried about Ghost, G or JVR as much as we are. AV and Fletcher have some explaining to do when it comes to why Therrien hasn't gone to what has worked in the past. There's definitely something a little more tentative and less aggressive with him right now. Part of that is the position most likely, maybe he's fighting a nagging injury, I'm not sure and I'm not sure it matters. If he does anything aggressive it's trying to spring TK and hope JVR comes up with rebound or something, but here's the thing I noticed in the last two games at least: He's not necessarily trying to score goals or points. He's trying to win. And I'm not sure he's trying to just win games, but I think he's thinking about the whole season. If they're up by a goal or two, Giroux's going to do exactly nothing to risk that lead. He's playing extremely conservatively. Part of that may have to do with being sick or banged up or frankly as a Dad myself I can say sometimes spending 9 days at home with a tiny baby is more exhausting than I could have ever imagined. No matter what it is, there may be something a little off with him, but I think that's just pushing him to put his focus on the fundamentals of executing AV's system exactingly.

I don't disagree, but that particular example sounds like Toronto Twitter being stupid.

Some of them play up the ignorant angle on stuff seemingly to appeal to the ire of their readers. I agree if we mean the team as constructed on opening day. As of the last game, they're only icing 3 rookies / minor leaguers. But they have needed as many as 5 or 6 some nights. Farabee might keep breaking out if he plays with Coots the rest of the year, but knowing AV, he's going to swap him with someone else who needs help. Kube and Bunny are trying their best and doing better. Ruby was okay his last stint, but the others haven't been great. I know the top 6/7 should be good good enough to make the playoffs, but in today's NHL, if you have a decent system and Decent D, having a decent bottom 6 can in fact make up for having a mediocre top 6. The good news is, I thought the bottom 6 played a hell of a game against the Penguins in Pittsburgh and that night, indeed your assessment held out. The Top guys were shut down pretty well (Jake's PPG aside) but Pitt's system and D and the Bottom 6 showed up big time to make a game of it. If this kind of thing can keep happening, I'll feel real good about the team's chances. More than likely, you're right, but if they give up 4+ goals a game, it won't really matter what Giroux and Jake do. The other half of the argument is that the last two playoff appearances, the bottom 6 (actually the bottom 9 really) were pretty bad which made the Flyers essentially a one line team and thus a relatively easy to shut down. I have to admit that the 2018 series against the Penguins made little to zero sense. It was yet another situation where they simply didn't have a healthy NHL goalie and that didn't help anything, but for the most part, that series had no rhyme or reason to it. The lop sidedness of the wins, regardless of which team was winning was just odd. It was an odd series on the whole. If we look back to 2016 and the caps however, I'll point out that the Flyers were 2-2 in that series when they held the caps to 2 goals or under. G and Jake were essentially shut down, but also at that time there really wasn't anyone else to score. At least in 2010, you had an emerging G, Briere, Richards, Carter, Hartnell, JVR and Gagne. But God love them (or hate them) some of what really made the difference that year was the likes of Ville Leino , Lappy and Dan Carcillo showing up. That team also had a mostly healthy Timmo, Coburn and what was that other guy's name? Oh yeah, Pronger... they almost helped make up for the backup and the minor leaguer in net. If you go back two years earlier to 2008, they had even fewer "stars" and it showed because they didn't score much at all, but what they did was not give up much at all in the series they won. I like the idea of Frost coming up for the playoffs and I hope they get him some more NHL time before then. I think he could end up being a nice wild card in the third line that teams might not know how to deal with. Ratcliffe's still got a ways to go. I don't know what to make about Patty. Fletch keeps saying he expects to see him this year... but nothing I'm seeing or hearing suggests that's even close to happening. I wish it were, but at this point in the season, what kind of player are they going to get? I don't want them to take a bad deal. Throughout this thread I think my posts (even the Toffoli or Getzlaf suggestions which didn't see it happening unless JVR was involved which I admitted didn't make sense for the Kings or Ducks) were metered. I'm not gung ho for anything in exchange for Ghost. Though Johnsson could make me think twice and Kappanen would probably get me to pull the trigger. There's no way to make it work cap wise because the Leafs aren't taking JVR back to be sure, but I'd jump at the chance to make Nylander work as well. That would get Giroux back onto wing and could make Hazy the full time 3C... though admittedly, it would be all but giving up on Patrick. Maybe Fletcher has enough information to do that. Who knows?

I follow Journalists on Twitter. This sounds familiar and tired. YES. there is always a problem with EVERY TEAM IN THE LEAGUE THAT DID NOT WIN THE CUP. And usually even with the team that just did. Just to be clear on this team's "problems" IMHO, the biggest problem is that their 2C/3C ended up having a weird non-hockey related Migraine condition and their 2LW/3LW got cancer. I'd be pretty comfortable with this team this year and I'd wager had neither of those things happened, we'd be having very different conversations on this board. 7 years ago the problem was Homer lost his damned mind and traded the core for a handful of magic beans at exactly the moment Pronger got speared in the eye and lost his career, Homer then traded JVR for Luke Schenn, Signed Bryzgalov, dumped Bobrovsky, didn't re-up Jagr and signed VLC. Everything between then and the start of last season was an inevitable waiting game. Last year I contended and still do (and this is more or less born out by Gordon's tenure) was the coaching staff. I just don't agree with this. Edmonton has two of these 70 point guys. The top two actually. How's that working out for them? The Stanley Cup Champions last year had point leaders of 70, 68, 54 and 46. How'd that work out for them? What about the Penguins? They exactly one player with more points than any Flyer (Malkin) who has 50 (compared to Coots' 43). Yet they're in 2nd place. The league leading Capitals have 2. The Oilers, Maple Leafs, Sabres, Blackhawks, Rangers, Jets, Golden Knights, all have players with more points than any Flyer and they're all worse than the Flyers. The Flyers problem isn't that they don't score enough goals or that their top guys don't score enough goals, it's that they give up too many goals (usually in the first two periods) on the road. That's really what's put them off the pace. If you REQUIRE multiple hundred point scorers on your team to be competitive in today's NHL, you will not be competitive in today's NHL. The game is about controlling play, not scoring tons of goals. So here's the difference I guess: I'm saying the top 6 are playing well and doing what it takes to win games when AV cannot control who is on the ice against whom. What you're saying is that the top 6 are not playing better enough to make up for the bottom 6 when AV cannot control who is on the ice against whom. In some ways, it's a matter of perspective I guess, but the question I'm left with at the end of the day is what's going to be more realistic for a team that spent up to the cap: Fixing it's top 6 or fixing it's bottom 6? You can want more out of Giroux, Jake, JVR and Hayes I guess but your options there are trying to replace them and just hoping they do better neither one seems very actionable. I'm trying to see the problems on the team that can actually be fixed in the next three years.

Problem is 3 of those 5 games are away. If they can't solve their last change bottom 6 problems with coaching or line juggling they could end up at the deadline in need of another miracle run instead of being in a pretty good position. Having to play Lyon at home against Columbus (at least) isn't going to help anything. It may be worth it to break up the top 6 to even out all the lines, but that could backfire too and just get every damn line scored on. Then I'll just have to listen to everyone whine about how "this team just doesn't have it" or "doesn't care" or "we need a new captain" or whatever instead of the very real assessment that we lost two key middle 6 players and never were able to replace them because the veteran leadership on this team is actually doing it's job. I can cope with it, I'm a big boy. But it'd help if everyone here and on twitter and what not could promise not to be short sighted complainers.