Travis Sanheim shows triumphs, challenges for Flyers’ plan

Last Wednesday, on an off-day in between games, John Tortorella\'s media availability began with three different questions about Travis Sanheim, who has turned into the Flyers\' no-doubt-about-it No. 1 defenseman both by merit (thanks to his own excellent play) and by necessity (due to a slew of injuries suffered by the other guys around him). His response to the last of those Sanheim-related questions was as follows:

He wants more. You can tell. He\'s just … remember how I felt about him the first year. I was pretty vocal about it. I just think he\'s made tremendous strides. I think there\'s more there, I do, and as I always say, the more important thing, I think, he thinks there\'s more there.

(Apologies for not giving proper credit to whoever asked the question that prompted that response, as it is difficult to make out what is being said by the media with the video provided.)

Since Torts mentioned \"the first year\", it seems worth providing a reminder on what, exactly, was going on between Tortorella and Sanheim during the 2022-23 season, the former\'s first year in Philadelphia. If we may:

About a month into the season, Tortorella said the following about Sanheim when asked to describe his play on a radio interview on the team\'s flagship station : \"Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. I don\'t know him, y\'know? I haven\'t seen him. I haven\'t seen him make a difference for us. I know him as far as what people have talked to me about him, but I certainly have not seen that. I just haven\'t seen it. Forget about using the word consistency, I have not seen it. And that\'s one of our guys who, he seems like a great guy, and I know he has the ability, but that\'s one of the guys that we need in this situation. [...] We have some work to do with our back end , but he should be a mainstay, and I just have not seen that at all.\" In Torts\' defense, he was largely correct; Sanheim got out to a pretty poor start that season.

After some up and down play in the months that followed, Sanheim had an excellent stretch of play in January and early February. Tortorella\'s reaction to that, via NBC Sports Philadelphia\'s Jordan Hall? \"Then you get the guy we saw for about a month this year. We saw it, both sides of the puck. As I told him then, now we saw it, now you\'re screwed. Because now we want to see it all the time.\"

Things took a turn for the worse after that, and the low point came later in February when Sanheim was healthy scratched in Calgary, where he played his junior hockey and reportedly had 16 family members and friends in the building to watch him play. Tortorella stood by the move, one that was (via Charlie O\'Connor, of The Athletic at the time ) reportedly not received well by the locker room.

A couple of weeks later, Sanheim (along with Joel Farabee) was benched for the entire second period after a bad shift in the first against Tampa Bay. Both the player and coach acknowledged later on that they had discussed their very-much-a-work-in-progress relationship, with Tortorella looking for Sanheim to have a \"more aggressive mindset\" and Sanheim saying that Torts had talked to him about \"meeting him halfway\".

About two weeks later , Tortorella said that \"we\'ve got to adjust ourselves in how we go about it,\" referring to his relationship with Sanheim going into the next season. He also denied that they \"are fighting\", which is probably true and also a very funny thing for a coach to have to say out loud.

There\'s probably more. You get the idea. John Tortorella saw a player with obvious talents that he believed had so much more to give, and clearly believed that a lot of that -- probably even moreso than his hockey talents or physical skills, which Tortorella always seemed to believe were there -- had to do with building up the player mentally.

Well, damn. Look who was on to something.

Sanheim had a very solid 2023-24 season, taking on slightly more responsibility while posting across-the-board better numbers than he did in his first year with Torts. And so far this season, it\'s probably difficult to find a player not named Matvei Michkov who would have a higher approval rating based on his work this season than Sanheim, especially after his efforts to effectively carry this defense as injuries have ravaged it in the past couple of weeks.

Maybe this -- Sanheim becoming a literal half-of-the-game mainstay -- would have happened here in this specific moment no matter what, purely out of necessity. No matter how much or how little the coach thought of Sanheim after that first year, he wasn\'t going anywhere; the eight-year, $50 million contract he signed at the start of the 2022-23 season ensured that pretty well. And when you consider the other options available on defense behind Sanheim and Rasmus Ristolainen, maybe Sanheim is still getting these type of minutes even if he doesn\'t exactly have the coach\'s trust. (And yes, Sanheim\'s ice time will surely drop a bit once the likes of Cam York, Jamie Drysdale, and hopefully Emil Andrae make their way back into the everyday lineup.)

But the step forward that the player seems to have made needs to be acknowledged. Sanheim was just short of 27 years old when that whole fracas with the scratch in Calgary happened. He will turn 29 next March. Bluntly, players with his amount of NHL experience accumulated do not usually make the kind of leap he seems to have made within the last two years, between his age-26/27 season and his age-28/29 season. And Tortorella -- the bluntest man imaginable -- pretty much said that Sanheim had made that leap in that same media availability from last Wednesday: \" I think he\'s brought his game to a whole different level. \"

Zooming out from Sanheim for a moment: this is what the Flyers are trying to do, right?

The Flyers are far from done adding potential or already-realized high-end talent to their roster. They damn well better be, at least, if this plan of theirs has any remote hope of succeeding. But the hope that they have had, from the start of all of this, is that even beyond just having great players, they are building the kind of place where every player who walks through that door and steps on that ice can find the best possible version of themselves as a player. Whether via the development plans in place (something they obviously see Tortorella as a key part of), the fellow players in the room, or even -- and here\'s that word again -- the culture that gets created as a result of their efforts, they believe that if they identify the right guys, they will come here and succeed because of what the Flyers have built. As much as you can build a Winning Culture without actually winning more games than you lose, the Flyers are trying to do just that.

Maybe that all sounds overly optimistic and idealistic in terms as plain as those. And here\'s the tough part to swallow: it might be. Travis Sanheim (assuming he keeps up this high level of play, which hopefully he does but it isn\'t a given) looks like a success story for the idea of a Winning Culture. There are other guys who fit that bill -- it\'d be tough to say that guys like Travis Konecny and Rasmus Ristolainen haven\'t also had substantial steps forward in the last two years. But if you are going to insist that with enough time and development and culture-building you are going to be able to build up just about anyone, we need to see it with pretty much everyone .

Which makes you wonder about the likes of, say, Morgan Frost or Joel Farabee, two guys who Tortorella has also publicly had a lot to say about in his time here and whose trajectories seem to be headed in the wrong direction. Or, honestly, about many of the early-20s guys on the roster, some of whom seem to have stagnated a bit in the early going this season.

It\'s maybe unfair to suggest that Sanheim\'s two-year turn from Tortorella\'s target of ire to Tortorella\'s most trusted defenseman sets the blueprint for how to get the most out of a young player who the team thinks it needs more out of. But when you make it clear that this is how you plan on building a team -- with no sights on bottoming out, with an emphasis on Building Something -- these are the kinds of steps forward you need to see.

Sanheim\'s step forward is a proof-of-concept moment for this franchise. It\'s also something of an outlier in the big picture of player development -- again, taking this kind of leap at age 28 isn\'t common. But for the Flyers\' long-term sake, it needs to be the standard and the expectation for everyone in the building. This whole idea of team-building that they have hinges on whether they can make it a reality.

Travis Sanheim shows the triumphs — and challenges ahead — for the Flyers’ plan

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