In the name of Brotherly Love, we’re stealing a recurring feature from our friends over at Bleeding Green Nation. Around once a month moving forward, around the beginning of the month, we’ll put out a pair of polls with a pair of simple questions for you, our readers: do you approve of the jobs that Ron Hextall and Dave Hakstol are doing in charge of the Flyers?
Hextall’s certainly had an eventful offseason. There will be a number of differences between the team the Flyers left last season with and the one they’ll start this season with. Some of those differences are a product of moves Hextall made at the NHL level — he traded Brayden Schenn to the Blues for two draft picks and Jori Lehtera, let a few veterans on defense walk to free agency, and essentially swapped Brian Elliott in for Steve Mason in net. Some other changes were a bit more out of his control — the Flyers moved from 13 to 2 in the lottery, allowing them to draft Nolan Patrick, and they also lost Pierre-Edouard Bellemare to Vegas in the expansion draft.
After a setback last year, Hextall seems ready to hand the reins over to some of the team’s prospects, both up front and on defense. Fans generally seem to be happy with the long-term outlook for this team, but there’s some pressure on Hextall to really get things moving in the right direction, be that via a playoff berth, progress and development from key young prospects, or both.
The offseason is, by nature, less of an exercise in evaluation of the head coach, who of course isn’t spending much time coaching hockey games. Meaning that right now, your opinion of Dave Hakstol — and/or your approval in his work — is probably the same as it was following a disappointing 2016-17 season. The coach that Hextall found from the University of North Dakota is under pressure in his third season in the NHL to show that he is the guy that can oversee the youth movement the Flyers are undergoing right now.
As such, we’ll be keeping tabs on the two of them throughout the year, and we’ll be able to see how you, the fans, react to the good and bad of this coming season. With that, you tell us: when it comes to the job performance of the Flyers’ general manager and head coach, do you approve, disapprove, or are you unsure at this time? Cast your vote in the two polls below, and we’ll check back in again right before the season starts.
Do you approve of the job Ron Hextall is doing as Flyers general manager?
| Yes | 2531 |
| No | 45 |
| Unsure | 60 |
Do you approve of the job Dave Hakstol is doing as Flyers head coach?
| Yes | 568 |
| No | 835 |
| Unsure | 1221 |
