The Philadelphia Flyers have officially hired two assistant coaches that will be working on head coach Rick Tocchet’s bench. And both have a variety of NHL experience.
Announced by the team Thursday morning, the Flyers have hired Jaroslav Svejkovsky and Jay Varady as two of the team’s assistant coaches.
OFFICIAL: We have hired Jaroslav Svejkovsky and Jay Varady as assistant coaches.
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) June 5, 2025
Svejkovsky and Varady will join head coach Rick Tocchet's staff behind the bench. https://t.co/zyN7Cjn3dM
“I’m excited to bring Yogi and Jay on board with me,” said Tocchet via the Flyers’ press release. “I know both of them very well. They each provide a different skill set and more importantly, a different voice, both of which I believe is crucial in not only building a coaching staff, but an entire team and how we grow together. I very much look forward to getting down to work with them again soon.”
Jaroslav Svejkovsky, who is also known as “Yogi”, was already rumored to be joining the Flyers and it was an obvious link. The former NHLer was on Tocchet’s bench with the Vancouver Canucks last season after quickly rising the ranks from being an assistant and skills coach with the WHL’s Vancouver Giants. Svejkovsky was the offense and power play coach for Vancouver for just last season, but was the team’s skills coach for the previous two.
The one coach that was not rumored and was not such an instant connection to make, is Jay Varady. The 47-year-old from Cahokia, IL was the Detroit Red Wings’ assistant coach under Derek LaLonde, most recently. When LaLonde was fired from his position in the middle of last season, Varady was kept around under new coach Todd McLellan. From what we can tell, there was not an official parting of ways but as of April, McLellan wanted to make some changes on the bench. It makes sense that he would be parting ways with someone who was from the previous regime and not an up-and-coming coach like Alex Tanguay on that staff.
But of course, there is a relation. Varady was one of Tocchet’s assistants during his time with the Arizona Coyotes and was mainly in charge of the penalty kill, but from what we can tell the defense was more of a by-committee effort and not one person solely in that role.
Regardless, it appears that Varady is a much more progressive coach than the failures in Detroit would tell us.
When Varady was hired by Detroit, The Athletic spoke with Tocchet about Varady’s role and what he would bring to the table. And essentially, in addition to his role in managing parts of the defense, Varady would serve as a communicator between the hockey analytics department and the bench.
“He was a conduit between the analytics department and the coaching staff,” Tocchet told The Athletic in July 2022. “So he would decipher stuff and get us the meat of the analytics part, he’d try to trim the fat for us.
“I knew, when I look at a hockey game, what’s important to me. And so Jay would try to help me, ‘OK, that is what we need in the analytics part, for you.’ And instead of having like 80 million pages to read, he’d have about three or four pages for me to go over. And that really made my life a lot smoother.”
While analytics and the general usage of more and more data has quickly taken over some decision making in the NHL, it takes someone that has a foot in both the analytics world and the “hockey man” world to communicate it well. It certainly sounds like Varady is exactly that.
It might have been obvious that Tocchet would bring in more familiar faces, but from all we can tell, these aren’t just hiring his old buddies. At least they aren’t coaches who also used to play for the Flyers.
