Hopelessness by Charlie O'Connor

[mojo1917]

https://theathletic.com/3057001/2022/01/10/hopelessness-has-infected-flyers-world-and-it-aint-pretty-oconnors-observations?source=user-shared-article

 

 

 

[mojo1917]

Here is the article which is behind a pay wall.

Pirating isn't my jam particularly, but i think there is good insight here:

 

Any hope that the turn of the calendar year would lead to a dramatic change in the fortunes of the Philadelphia Flyers was snuffed out before even two full weeks had passed.

The team’s seven-game standings point streak in December is now a distant memory. The Flyers haven’t notched a victory since Dec. 29. They’ve dropped five straight decisions. Claude Giroux, Ivan Provorov, Travis Sanheim and Travis Konecny all remain in COVID protocol and Sean Couturier sits due to injury. This right now is an underwhelming, even uncompetitive team.

 

And it’s wearing on everyone in the Flyers’ orbit.

 

Negativity abounds at the moment, but the Flyers’ issues go far beyond mere pessimism. No, the knives are out in full force all over the place, from remarks in news conferences to all over social media within the fandom. And at the core, one problem looms above all of it, one issue that has sucked the life out of everything Flyers-related.

 

1. The problem of hopelessness:

 

This past week certainly wasn’t lacking for Flyers-related storylines.

One could zero in on the impact of COVID-19 protocol on the quality of the team’s lineup, and the frustration it’s created within the Flyers’ dressing room. Or on interim head coach Mike Yeo’s comments directly attacking the team’s resolve and compete level. Or the simmering fan frustration, particularly on social media. Or the simple fact that the club’s seven-game point streak — in the wake of a 10-game winless streak — has now morphed into a new five-game winless streak.

 

But before getting into any of those specifics, it’s best to understand it all as one overarching theme — a theme that links every issue together and helps to explain why things seem so dismal in Flyers World at the moment.

 

Hopelessness.

 

Right now, the Flyers simply appear to be a hopeless team. They’re not technically out of playoff contention — still just five points out with 47 games left — but they’re not playing anywhere near well enough to make a second-half surge seem possible. They’re one of the worst clubs in hockey by five-on-five advanced metrics (31st by Evolving-Hockey’s expected goal share, 23rd by shot attempt share). The coach is publicly questioning their effort level. The roster isn’t anywhere close to full strength, but even if they were to miraculously get everyone back at 100 percent health, it’s unlikely even that team would be talented enough to hold its own against the NHL’s true contenders. And there’s no clear, immediate path visible for the front office to get there.

 

When a team reaches a state like this, rationality and logic fall by the wayside, because even viable explanations feel like convenient excuses. Note that a team lacking basically all of its best players at the moment is unlikely to win? Who cares? They wouldn’t have won even with those guys anyway. Point out that objectively, it’s too early for any front office to fully “give up” on a season when more than half of the games remain and a playoff spot remains at least in theoretical striking distance? “This team can’t and won’t go on a run like that,” one would retort, and even if they somehow did, a first-round exit would be the inevitable result regardless. OK, so what about embarking on a rebuild, centered around stockpiling assets and young talent? “Oh great, another five years of bad hockey and getting excited about prospects who won’t live up to expectations anyway,” many moan.

 

It’s sports nihilism at its most bleak. Hope isn’t just in short supply — it’s nonexistent. And based on Yeo’s comments this week, it sure sounds like he believes it’s the fans aren’t the only ones who have been infected by it.

 

2. Resiliency on a team level

 

Yeo didn’t hesitate to hit his team with both barrels after Thursday’s 6-2 loss to the Penguins, calling out their compete level, resiliency, heart and fight. Many fans may not have seen such comments as a big deal, largely because they’ve been directing those exact insults at the team for months (if not years). But coaches generally aren’t this blunt in their critiques to the media, particularly those with Yeo’s calm personality. Add in the fact that the Flyers were icing an extremely short-handed lineup from a talent standpoint on Thursday — to the point where a victory would have been a major shock to most — and Yeo’s comments stick out even more. He was clearly trying to send a message to his club.

 

And what was that message? Here’s one way to interpret it: stop giving into hopelessness on the ice.

 

Yeo’s critique centered around one specific point in time — the first period. As he noted, the Flyers actually got off to a decent start on Thursday, especially given the lineup on the ice. Then, the Penguins scored a goal, and the Flyers let the game fall apart.

 

“We can’t just have a good start like we did last night, and then next thing you know, something goes wrong and within a three-minute span, you give up two more goals,” Yeo said. “How you handle that, how you deal with that, how you come out the next shift and reset things and get back on your game … (it’s) the same thing with how you bounce back from a tough loss.”

 

Yeo’s implication was obvious: when one thing goes wrong for the Flyers, a “here we go again” mentality creeps into far too many of their heads. Opposing clubs sense that lack of confidence like sharks sniffing blood in the water, and suddenly, a 1-0 deficit becomes a 3-0 deficit and a two-game skid turns into 10. It happens far too often with this era’s Flyers team, and Yeo seemingly was fed up with it.

 

3. Lack of talent a driving force

 

So why do the Flyers tend to fall into hopelessness so often in the face of adversity, to the point where the coach felt the need to explicitly point it out?

 

Above all, it’s the talent.

 

Sweeping aside all the on-the-record cliches that sometimes come off as less than insightful, hockey players aren’t stupid when it comes to evaluating their own sport. For the most part, they have a pretty good idea which players are good and which ones are bad — and in turn, whether a team on paper truly looks formidable or actually weak. So long before the puck dropped on Thursday, the players surely knew they were overmatched talent-wise — which probably made it easier to see Goal No. 1 as a harbinger of looming disaster.

 

“Whether it was because we looked at our lineup and didn’t think we had enough, I’m not sure,” Yeo said, which read as a tacit admission that he suspected they did just that.

 

This isn’t a new issue. In the early years of Ron Hextall’s tenure, the Flyers were an obviously top-heavy team, filled with quite a few impact forwards (Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, Wayne Simmonds) the envy of every team in hockey, but lacking anything in the way of quality depth or a well-rounded blue line corps. The goal, of course, was that Hextall’s restocking of the farm system would ultimately create a deep, talented club at every position. But now, even the best young players unearthed by Hextall — potentially sans Carter Hart, who remains the last, best hope for a homegrown star from the Hextall era — look unlikely to crack impact player status. Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, Nolan Patrick, Travis Sanheim, Philippe Myers, Morgan Frost were supposed to provide the next wave. Instead, even Provorov, Konecny and Sanheim — who are clearly solid NHLers — don’t look like team centerpieces.

 

The result? The Flyers aren’t good enough on paper to be serious contenders, and they haven’t been for years. It’s much easier for in-game situations to snowball when there aren’t enough “stoppers” on a team to provide a game-changing shift out of nowhere and turn momentum back the other way. And it’s much harder to believe that a roster can impose its will on opponents night after night when, deep down, players know they’re not on a club loaded with dynamic talent. Everything comes harder when talent is lacking, a lesson the Flyers are learning the hard way right now with Giroux, Couturier, Provorov, Konecny, Sanheim and Ryan Ellis all out of the lineup. But it’s also was a lesson that could have been taken from icing a team for years with Andrew MacDonald on the top pair or beginning a season with two major injury risks (Brian Elliott come off surgery, Michal Neuvirth being, well, Michal Neuvirth) as the primary goalie tandem.

Talented top-to-bottom teams tend to win lots of games. The Flyers aren’t that, and for the bulk of the last decade haven’t been.

 

4. Questions regarding leadership

 

If a coach openly criticizes a team’s heart and its ability to respond to adversity, the spotlight is going to logically turn to one subsection of the roster: the leaders. After all, they’re the ones who are expected to set the standards for the team, right? If there’s an effort and resiliency problem with the Flyers, it logically has to start with the leadership group. Right?

 

In truth, it’s far more complex than that. Take Yeo’s comments just a day after he ripped his club, which play as the opposite of critiques of the team’s leaders.

 

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have three guys that are out of our lineup that wear letters,” Yeo said. “Obviously, leadership is critical in a game like that, to give you the ability to come back, to be the example of what you need to do. And also, when you do give up a goal, you can come back with a guy like Coots and make sure that the other team’s not going to score. You can put a guy like G out there to give yourself a better opportunity to score.”

 

Yeo’s next-day clarification served two purposes. First, he pointed out the strangeness of pinning Thursday’s game on the team’s leaders when — at least in his eyes — part of the problem was that those leaders weren’t able to suit up at all, and the Flyers suffered from their absence. Second, it served to hammer home the talent argument; it’s much easier to avoid collapsing with high-end players in the lineup.

That said, Yeo’s comments weren’t a conversation-ender. After all, Giroux and Couturier were both around for the 10-game winless streak. They were right there during the entirety of the 2020-21 season, which was marred with lots of similar “one goal turns into three” in-game meltdowns. Sure, the leadership corps may not have been at fault this time. But if team-wide hopelessness is a problem with the team’s culture, the leaders played a role in building that culture, so they can’t be let off the hook entirely. So how does a team develop a mentality of not constantly expecting the other shoe to drop at the first sign of trouble? To answer that, Justin Braun — who played a key role on Sharks clubs that averaged a 99.6 standings point pace per season over nine years — was asked to explain how those teams developed resiliency.

 

“(Joe Thornton) did a good job of holding guys accountable. You had guys like (Joe Pavelski) who would just go out there and get the job done,” Braun recalled. “We had that culture for a long time there when I showed up. It was, ‘we’re gonna be tough to play at home,’ you had to be ready every night or you were going to hear from the guys or the coach. The accountability there was good. I think we need to get to a point where we’re like that here.”

 

Braun’s comments spread like wildfire across social media on Friday, in large part because Giroux’s preferred “lead by example” leadership style is so similar to Braun’s description of Pavelski. But might the Flyers be lacking a Thornton? Could that help to explain it?

Well, maybe. But it’s worth remembering that there once was a “Thornton-type” in this very dressing room, by the name of Wayne Simmonds. And those Simmonds teams didn’t win anything of note either — again, because of the relative dearth of talent. It’s not unfair to say that Giroux as captain has yet to find the ideal leadership buttons to push to drive this team into yearly contention. But it’s also fair to wonder if any leadership combination or style would be able to do so with the rosters that the Flyers have dressed for the last decade.

 

5. Another theory to explain the hopelessness problem

 

There are plenty of theories that could help explain the Flyers’ apparent lack of resiliency. Lack of sufficient high-end talent is a big one, and probably the biggest factor. Leadership style certainly could play a role, though it’s much more difficult to measure. But there’s another, more off-the-wall theory I’ve turned over in my head recently, one that I acknowledge reaches more toward amateur psychologist than I generally like to go.

 

Perhaps the pervasive “here we go again” attitude that seems to infect the players so frequently is merely the logical, cumulative result of the last 10 years of Flyers hockey.

 

Hextall’s primary stated reason as to why he chose to go with the “stay semi-competitive while reloading” rebuild path instead of a scorched-earth teardown was actually, ironically, driven by his belief in the importance of culture. Hextall believed that turning a team into an intentional loser for multiple seasons would have a negative effect on the attitudes of the players, and the developmental environment for the youngsters coming in. Essentially, he felt that “bottoming out” would create a culture where losing became accepted, and therefore he charted a middle path, where the star players on the roster would keep the team on the outskirts of the playoff race and ensure that winning (to a degree) remained a central, achievable goal.

 

I wonder if that strategy backfired. I wonder if, by fostering an environment where the team was good enough to stay in contention, but flawed enough that the rug would ultimately be pulled out from under everyone before real success could actually be achieved, if too many players came to expect the worst in key situations. An entire era of Flyers hockey became defined by the brass ring being just out of reach, and maybe there are only so many times it can be pulled away before such a result starts to feel inevitable all of the time.

 

Even the two seasons in the past 10 years that saw the Flyers actually have an objectively strong hockey team — 2011-12 and 2019-20 — were plagued by almost cosmic events of sheer misfortune. The 2011-12 team lost its Hall of Fame-caliber defenseman to a career-ending, total fluke injury. The 2019-20 club first was robbed of a breakout forward due to a cancer diagnosis, and then all of its momentum due to a once-in-a-generation pandemic. And those were the good years!

Frankly, if any Flyers players who have spent a large portion of this decade (or all of it) on this team truly have developed a creeping sense of fatalism that rears its head whenever disaster yet again appears to strike in a game, it would be understandable, maybe even forgivable.

 

6. Fans are sick of it all

 

Saturday night’s game against the San Jose Sharks wasn’t exactly set up to draw a packed house. Due to a late schedule change, the Philadelphia Eagles were playing right across the street at 8:15 p.m., about an hour after puck drop, creating a traffic and parking nightmare for anyone on the fence about heading to South Philly. The Flyers, obviously, have been struggling on the ice for over two months. The Sharks are no longer a marquee opponent, and never really measured up to local rivals even in their heyday. Oh, and there’s a pandemic still going on, which has the effect of diminishing turnout from both sides of the political divide due to fears of catching the virus and the city-wide vaccine/negative-test requirement regulations that the Wells Fargo Center now must follow.

 

That said, it was still a Saturday night game, and they tend to draw strong crowds. Instead, there was this.

 

In the end, if the team was competitive and was inspiring hope in the fan base, my guess is that people would have found a way to pack the arena, regardless of the circumstances. Instead, given the situation, far too many fans understandably decided it wasn’t worth the trek or the cost. Hopelessness.

 

7. The Ed Snider controversy

 

But at least in vocal pockets on social media, Flyers fans aren’t so hopeless as to have devolved into sheer apathy, as last week’s controversy regarding founder Ed Snider’s 89th birthday hinted.

The short version of this particular drama? Snider — who died in April 2016 — would have turned 89 on Jan. 6, which happened to be the date of a Flyers home game this season. However, there was no mention of Snider’s birthday during the in-game presentation, nor on social media throughout the day. Those who feel that the Flyers have completely lost their way since Snider’s passing were especially outraged at the perceived snub, and Snider’s daughter Sarena even criticized the Flyers for it Saturday on Twitter.

 

The organization’s response, via Broad Street Hockey’s Stephanie Driver, was as follows:

 

It’s a fair point that they hadn’t honored Snider’s birthday in the wake of his passing any year prior to this one and had never received backlash. And in truth, honoring a deceased person’s birthday is something that could be interpreted as being in poor taste. That said, once the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation — founded of course by Snider himself — announced on social media that they would be specifically celebrating his 89th birthday, it would have been very easy for the organization to follow suit in some small way. Ultimately, this was a PR failing and an unforced error by the Flyers.

 

But there are quite a few layers to this, beyond the obvious. There absolutely is truth to the charge that the Flyers — particularly the business department — have not come close to cracking the “living up to Ed’s legacy” code, and often seem uncomfortable when trying to do so, likely in part because there’s a knowledge that Snider’s unique brand of ownership is essentially inimitable, and every time his name is brought up, it opens the door for the (unfavorable) comparison to be made between how things were then and how they are now. Then, there’s the fact that this social media controversy was largely spearheaded by Crossing Broad’s Snow the Goalie podcast, which has essentially been in open war with the Flyers’ business department for quite a while now; it’s not difficult to imagine the latter looking at all of this in the lead-up to Jan. 6 and seeing it more as rabble-rousing than a good-faith suggestion, even if celebrating Snider for basically any reason at all would have surely been received well by the fan base at large regardless of who was pushing the idea most forcefully.

 

There’s absolutely a story here regarding the feeling on the part of the Snider family and some alumni (one of whom is a co-host on said podcast) that the Flyers are not adequately honoring their past. It’s a perception that the organization should work toward addressing and combating, and that will take time, effort and fence-mending. But from my perspective, a lot of this Snider-related fan backlash is, first and foremost, a stand-in for frustration with the on-ice product, which has reached a fever pitch since the start of the 2020-21 season; there’s a reason, after all, why no one seemed to care that they weren’t making a big deal about Snider’s birthday in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and even 2021. Fans are (justifiably) livid right now at how far the team has fallen, and are looking for any overarching explanation as to why. Comcast is an easy target as a unifying theory.

But the hard truth is that Comcast isn’t close to the biggest reason why the Flyers are struggling right now. In fact, even as many ownership groups across the NHL have pulled back on the purse strings in the post-pandemic world when it comes to hockey operations, Comcast Spectacor has kept spending, a fact that multiple sources have confirmed to me over the past few months, and their push for a new round of analytics hires proves.

 

Dave Scott and Comcast are not Ed Snider, no — they’re not in the top 1 percent of all North American sports owners in terms of commitment to winning and understanding the nuances of their market like Snider obviously was. But teams don’t need a “Snider-type” owner to win games and championships; plenty of teams thrive without one. Most owners that qualify as “good” basically do two key things: they spend money and they let their front offices and player evaluation types do their jobs with minimal meddling. Comcast largely meets both requirements.

 

Given the quality of the team’s play over the past year, however, few are giving the organization the benefit of the doubt on anything anymore. And that won’t change until the Flyers turn things around on the ice.

 

8. Is a rebuild hopeless too?

 

So how do they go about turning things around? The knee-jerk response on the part of many in the fan base is simple: blow it up. Hextall’s mistake was that he didn’t go all-in on a full-scale rebuild, instead choosing a half-in, half-out middle ground that appears to have flopped in terms of producing a new wave of impact talent for the big club to replace aging stars like Giroux and Couturier.

But here’s that looming hopelessness again: a full rebuild isn’t guaranteed to work either, and the Flyers aren’t exactly ideally positioned to execute on one.

 

An initial sell-off wouldn’t be too difficult to execute — part ways with Giroux (preferably after receiving permission to trade him and acquire future assets in the process), trade away as many expiring contracts at the deadline as possible (Rasmus Ristolainen, Justin Braun, Martin Jones, Derick Brassard) and then in the offseason, try to ship out some younger pieces with term left on their deals for prospect/picks packages. But the Flyers would still be left with a number of hard-to-move contracts with lots of term left — Kevin Hayes, Ryan Ellis, Cam Atkinson and even Sean Couturier, whose aging timeline suddenly wouldn’t quite match up with the realities of a rebuild, which would take multiple years to bear fruit. A full teardown isn’t going to be easy to pull off.

 

Would the Flyers actually be able to become bad enough quick enough to start stockpiling multiple top-five draft picks to supercharge a rebuild, especially if Carter Hart — viewed universally as one of the team’s few untouchables — keeps playing well enough to prevent the team from fully bottoming out in a way that only a goalie can in hockey? It’s a legitimate question, but one that only leads to more despair regarding the organization’s chances of righting the ship.

 

9. Hopelessness on the idea of prospects

 

Another inherently concerning aspect of a rebuild for jaded fans? The fact that yet again, they’d have to trust in the prospect of, well, prospects.

 

After years upon years of largely selling off draft picks in a constant attempt to “win now,” most of the fan base was ready for Hextall’s pivot to a draft-and-develop model. There’s an element of hope that comes with rooting for young players in junior or college or overseas to turn into stars; our prospect ranking articles don’t sell a ton of subscriptions by accident after all. The promise of a brighter future driven by youth is an enticing one.

 

But is it so enticing to Flyers fans at the moment?

 

Many seem to feel like they were sold a bill of goods on the prospects acquired via the Hextall rebuild, and that “betrayal” leads to cynicism. The next top-five pick the Flyers acquire will have to prove he’s not “just another Nolan Patrick” to skeptical fans. Dominant performances in junior will be taken lightly — after all, look at Morgan Frost and Travis Konecny, who we allowed ourselves to believe were budding superstars. They tore up the OHL, right? Now look at them. And so on and so forth.

 

Even the outcome that many fans are hoping for — a move to a rebuild — comes with likely hopelessness.

 

10. So can it all be fixed?

 

That’s the million-dollar question, of course.

 

Yeo is still trying to address the problem on the team level, as his comments after Thursday’s game showed. On Saturday, the still short-handed Flyers had a better effort vs. the Sharks — at least for two periods. Then, old issues re-emerged in the third, as the team blew a 2-0 lead and lost shortly into overtime.

 

“I think there was some attempt at it, but I think a lot of that stuff is habits, too,” Yeo said. “In the third period, when the game’s on the line and things are tense, that’s when your habits come out and I thought that’s where a lot of our bad habits came out. We’ve got to continue to build the right habits here, and continue to show the benefit of doing the right things and what happens, and the consequences of doing the wrong things.”

 

If Yeo can convince his team that good habits will indeed be rewarded, perhaps some of that hopelessness that has infected the Flyers as a whole will dissipate. For now, however, it’s everywhere.

(Photo: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)

Edited January 12, 2022 by pilldoc
Edited for format

[MaineFlyFan]

Wait. So, it's hopeless? That's what they're saying right?!..... knowing this NOW would save me a lot of time and grief over the next 20+ years.

 

(That literally took me like 25 minutes to read. Jesus....)

 

Thanks for sharing Mojo. 

 

 

 

 

[flyercanuck]

Seems like he ran almost the entire gamut but stopped short of any blame to the present regime...other than the mere mention of those bad contracts. 

I still can't understand why players like Provorov and Konecny can look so good only a few short years ago and now look like they were never much more than average. They've already been that good!  When they were younger...and they should be getting better, not worse.

[pilldoc]

@mojo1917

 

I too have a subscription to "The Athletic".  (I got is cheap on Black Friday ... $1 / month for 12 months...can't beat that).

 

They have some great articles and insight.  I saw this article too.  Thanks for posting it ....

[OccamsRazor]

2 hours ago, flyercanuck said:

Seems like he ran almost the entire gamut but stopped short of any blame to the present regime...other than the mere mention of those bad contracts. 

I still can't understand why players like Provorov and Konecny can look so good only a few short years ago and now look like they were never much more than average. They've already been that good!  When they were younger...and they should be getting better, not worse.

 

 

Because they have no system and plan in  place it seems that other teams can't figure out.

 

No identity.

 

And then the lack of execution and rolled up into one giant mess once you sprinkle in the players who just aren't very good with the ones who have been here a long time on top of new arrivals who have contracts the team can't get out of and they know so they DGAF and it shows and well ....I give you the 2021-22 Philadelphia Flyers ladies and gentlemen.

 

One HUGE clusterfcuk....

 

[mojo1917]

@pilldoc

I too got that $1 per month deal. The Down Goes Brown articles alone are worth that price.

 

[SCFlyguy]

Re: Hopelessness: "Welcome to the party, pal"!

 

Where was O'Connor last year or in the offseason when the merry bunch of goons with CTE in the Flyers' front office made the moves that resulted in this team?

 

This outcome was always the most likely, so why did he have hope in the first place?

 

I am trying to understand how a Flyers' writer could look at the last 10 years and consider what Hextall did a rebuild, as if any strategy that didn't flush second round picks for Andrew MacDonald is a rebuild.

[Math]

I don't know if it was mentioned earlier.

 

 

[SCFlyguy]

I'm surprised Clarke didn't say, "We didn't tell Patrick to go get migraines. It's too bad that he did. We feel sorry for him, but then he went goofy on us."

[CoachX]

i stopped readin halfway through

 

it was hopeless

[Howie58]

I posted a separate thread on this and will suppress it.  I am a bit more sympathetic.  Yes, Clarke has his own sins to atone for but Hextall may not have been a good listener.  At the time, his dismissal was described in terms of Lincoln dismissing McClellan--"he suffers from the slows."  Maybe there was more.  

[mojo1917]

3 hours ago, SCFlyguy said:

Re: Hopelessness: "Welcome to the party, pal"!

 

Where was O'Connor last year or in the offseason when the merry bunch of goons with CTE in the Flyers' front office made the moves that resulted in this team?

 

This outcome was always the most likely, so why did he have hope in the first place?

 

I am trying to understand how a Flyers' writer could look at the last 10 years and consider what Hextall did a rebuild, as if any strategy that didn't flush second round picks for Andrew MacDonald is a rebuild.

You can look back in time and see where the mistakes were made?

What a gift.

 

 

[GratefulFlyers]

17 hours ago, mojo1917 said:

Pirating isn't my jam particularly, but i think there is good insight here:

 

Thanks for the link it was well worth reading...seems the author gleaned quite a bit from this board - or more probably it's just that "great minds think alike."

 

And don't worry about stealing a young and budding writer's original work. Yes his dear mother scrubbed floors (on her hands and knees of course) to earn the money to send him to that big Writin' School...his pa up and died when the strong rains came leaving the poor young lad and his old ma to fend for themselves... but don't give it a second thought!

 

 

[SCFlyguy]

1 hour ago, mojo1917 said:

You can look back in time and see where the mistakes were made?

What a gift.

 

 

It's ok if you can't.

 

My most wrong opinion was when I tried clowning Rad on philly.com in 2005? when he was despondent about the Patrick Sharp trade.  That one didn't work out so well for me or the Flyers in the long run.

[mojo1917]

Two things really jumped out at me in the article. 

The first was Mike Yeo recognizes this level of dysregulation and is giving no foxes about it.

He is harping on effort and compete level. 

It may take a big roster turnover or just some cats buying into his mantra to see a turn around. But the coach is acknowledging the malaise and trying get guys to fight through it. It may not be enough to "get him the job" but the next guy needs to start with effort and compete level.

 

The other is point #5 and the Hextall "remain competitive while rebuilding" and the effect that may have had on the team's psyche.

I thought this in particular was a good observation.

18 hours ago, mojo1917 said:

I wonder if that strategy backfired. I wonder if, by fostering an environment where the team was good enough to stay in contention, but flawed enough that the rug would ultimately be pulled out from under everyone before real success could actually be achieved, if too many players came to expect the worst in key situations. An entire era of Flyers hockey became defined by the brass ring being just out of reach, and maybe there are only so many times it can be pulled away before such a result starts to feel inevitable all of the time

 

I really think there is some merit to this idea.

On twitter when Charlie is watching a game there comes a point in a losing effort where he types "welp" and I really wonder if the whole team has been thinking that for years.

 

 

[homer]

If an owner and management team had come in here 10 years ago with the sole purpose of making hockey irrelevant in Philadelphia, they couldn't have done a better job. There's no reason not to tear it down and start from scratch. I, for one, would enjoy watching a young team, even if they're bad, as long as I can see they're building toward something.

[radoran]

21 minutes ago, SCFlyguy said:

It's ok if you can't.

 

My most wrong opinion was when I tried clowning Rad on philly.com in 2005? when he was despondent about the Patrick Sharp trade.  That one didn't work out so well for me or the Flyers in the long run.

 

We Catamounts gotta stick together ya know?

 

[radoran]

6 minutes ago, mojo1917 said:

The other is point #5 and the Hextall "remain competitive while rebuilding" and the effect that may have had on the team's psyche.

I thought this in particular was a good observation.

 

See, I actually don't think that is "Hextall" - I think that's STILL the phillyosophy down at the big bank Building.

 

The Hayes signing, and roster reset over the summer simply SCREAMS that.

 

You don't "rebuild" and sign guys to seven and eight year deals and trade for guys with six years left...

 

I fundamentally disagree with the concept that that was "Hextall"'s idea.

[mojo1917]

1 hour ago, GratefulFlyers said:

And don't worry about stealing a young and budding writer's original work. Yes his dear mother scrubbed floors (on her hands and knees of course) to earn the money to send him to that big Writin' School...his pa up and died when the strong rains came leaving the poor young lad and his old ma to fend for themselves.

... and then uncle Chester got the Rickets it was a terrible year. 

 

I have a couple of friends who make their living by writing for gossip sites.

They're really funny and talented writers because of that, I do have an outsized sensitivity towards sharing other people's IP.

 

 

[GratefulFlyers]

8 minutes ago, mojo1917 said:

The other is point #5 and the Hextall "remain competitive while rebuilding" and the effect that may have had on the team's psyche.

 

I thought this one was a little "iffy" and he acknowledges he went out on a limb on this one IIRC. While I think his reasoning is sound I never thought Hextall was doing a "mini" or halfway rebuild. It feels like 20/20 hindsight to call it that now. Most of the talk at the time was how depleted the farm team was and how well Hextall was doing restocking it.

 

To the extent the Flyers ever do - or ever did - a "real" rebuild Hextall did it. They didn't send out a letter stating that and I'm quite sure as Rad just noted the "remain competitive" mantra was always going to be a part of what Hextall could get ever approved. But it felt like and seemed like a rebuild to me at the time. IMHO it went off the rails when management bailed on it.

[mojo1917]

29 minutes ago, SCFlyguy said:

t's ok if you can't.

Actually, I have 20/15 hindsight, I just wish you'd bring some more forward-thinking posts. 

Most of us know what's happened. 

[mojo1917]

@GratefulFlyers

@radoran

 

Okay the competitive rebuild may not have been Hextall's idea that's not what I thought was interesting. at all.

Yes, he was the GM who came in and tried to rebuild the farm and the prospects, and this was during what were to be the prime years

of the VeeGees® radoran 

I thought Charlie had a pretty creative thought around the players "knowing" they weren't good enough to achieve better results after years of not being able to take the next step. 

That is an idea that I hadn't thought of, nor had I heard anyone lay that idea out the way he did.

We were always half-mocking "definitely a playoff team® " and criticizing the teams leadership corps.  

It was an interesting supposition that he scaffolded pretty well.

 

[radoran]

17 minutes ago, mojo1917 said:

I thought Charlie had a pretty creative thought around the players "knowing" they weren't good enough to achieve better results after years of not being able to take the next step. 

That is an idea that I hadn't thought of, nor had I heard anyone lay that idea out the way he did.

We were always half-mocking "definitely a playoff team® " and criticizing the teams leadership corps.  

It was an interesting supposition that he scaffolded pretty well.

 

It's an interesting perspective and builds upon more than invalidates or questions the general assumptions.

 

I just don't think that there has been anyone "in the room" willing to call out others in the room because no one in the room felt that they had the achievement base from which to criticize. It gets into a real circular problem there. And if its not going to be "the captain" - who is it?

 

I thought the point about Braun/Sharks/Thornton was a good one. Thornton set a tone - you work to this level or we're calling you out for it. Pavelski set the mark for level of play "by example." The Sharks were actually good for an extended period of time - whether or not they won a Cup with it. If the Flyers had a couple of Conference Finals, a Cup Final, and a few second round losses over the past 10 years, we're having much different conversations about where the team is at this point.

 

I don't get the feeling there is that sort of a culture in the Flyers' room. And it's something I alluded to when talking about the guys from "leadership groups" that were brought in over the summer: bringing in "leaders" from Columbus, Buffalo, and Florida isn't bringing in a "winning culture" and when you lose Ellis' Nashville perspective the void just grows.

 

I still think losing Ellis hurt this team much more than anything else. That said, they shouldn't be in a position where losing one guy totally derails the entire season (yes, I know they "lost" Hayes, too). But they apparently are...

[OccamsRazor]

40 minutes ago, mojo1917 said:

Two things really jumped out at me in the article. 

The first was Mike Yeo recognizes this level of dysregulation and is giving no foxes about it.

He is harping on effort and compete level. 

It may take a big roster turnover or just some cats buying into his mantra to see a turn around. But the coach is acknowledging the malaise and trying get guys to fight through it. It may not be enough to "get him the job" but the next guy needs to start with effort and compete level.

 

The other is point #5 and the Hextall "remain competitive while rebuilding" and the effect that may have had on the team's psyche.

I thought this in particular was a good observation.

 

I really think there is some merit to this idea.

On twitter when Charlie is watching a game there comes a point in a losing effort where he types "welp" and I really wonder if the whole team has been thinking that for years.

 

 

 

 

@GratefulFlyers

 

Honestly I think if they would have just put it back on the players back in 2013 when they jumped the gun and canned Lavy after a 0-3 maybe things may have been a whole lot better.

 

I mean damn they had a young team 12 players who were 25 or younger.

 

But nope they really really wanted their guy in there Berube so Lavy had to go.

 

All the issues from the dry Islands days and misteps by management with Bryz and just got rid of that bum before that season and well Lavvy was the sacrificial lamb.

 

Since I started watching the Flyer back in 1991 Lavy was and still my favorite Flyer coach.

 

It pissed me off. Because I knew back then it was Lavy and his system that was the damn issues it was the players and their lack of effort and execution.

 

Well I be goddammit fast forward to 2021 here we the fcuk are hitching our horse to a lame mule and then setting the wagon on fire because we'll it the wagons fault the mule is lame...

 

...to bad I'm at work I need a drink.