Rick Tocchet’s Flyers are exactly who history said they’d be

The NHL coaching fraternity is a tight knit group that operates on shorter than ever life spans. The average bench boss in the league lasts just 2.38 years with an organization. That ticking clock is always looming in the background, the ticks louder the worse the team performs.

Of the 32 head coaches, 19 have been an NHL head coach before their present role. Amongst those is Rick Tocchet of the Philadelphia Flyers. Tocchet entered this season as the coach with the 7th most games of experience behind the bench. That means there was a reasonable understanding of what Tocchet’s style of hockey looks like and how it translates.

Through 54 games in Philadelphia, Tocchet’s Flyers are 24-20-10, good enough to still be in the mix but nine points back of the last playoff spot. In year one of a new head coach against the backdrop of a building franchise, the overall results are passable. That said, since the start of the new year, the Flyers are 4-8-3 and have been outscored 62-43.

After mirages under John Tortorella, there was a reasonable level of excitement for Tocchet. Yet, what exactly does a good Tocchet team look like? For a coach who’s managed to spend ten years behind benches as a head man, Tocchet has made the normal playoffs a single time. Yes, in fairness his Coyotes did pull off an upset in the bubble playoffs but in the normal format, neither them or the Nashville Predators would\'ve qualified.

With such an established track record, Tocchet is one of the more known quantities in the NHL. After all, he\'s got the sixth most games coached of any active bench boss.

Surface Level

The NHL season is an 82 game marathon. Trades, injuries, wavers, call-ups, firings, hirings, hot streaks, cold streaks. There are shooting benders and hot goalies that last full seasons. Confidence and morale are sticky variables in the world of professional sports. Nobody believes in us and healthy skepticism is quite the motivator.

For Tocchet, the average NHL season is 31-28-10. As someone who’s taken over in-season as an interim coach two separate times, his averages don’t fill the 82 game mark. The season points average for Tocchet’s teams checks in at 75.3 and that includes prorating the 2019-2020 and 2021 shortened seasons to 82 game outputs.

For context, Tocchet has coached the 56th most games in the history of the NHL. Of coaches with at least 690, the number of games Tocchet has coached, only six have worse points percentages: Red Kelly, Milt Schmidt, Michel Bergeron, Rick Bowness, Sid Abel and Jaques Demers. Of those six, Kelly and Schmidt were inducted to the Hall of Fame as players and Demers won a Stanley Cup.

The point being, Tocchet’s career as a coach up until this point is an outlier. In the contemporary NHL, to last this long as a coach without yielding sustained, long-term success is basically unheard of. Sure, Bowness is still kicking after the Blue Jackets hired him earlier this season, but he at least has a Stanley Cup Final appearance to his name.

The Hand You\'re Dealt

Naturally, the recourse in Tocchet’s defense would be the teams he’s inherited. An interim basis in Tampa Bay that carried over into a second year, the perpetually doomed Arizona Coyotes, ditto the Vancouver Canucks and now the Flyers. The former Flyer captain hasn’t exactly been handed the keys to the Wayne Gretzky Oilers in his stints as a head coach.

However, there are some undercurrents of Tocchet’s style that hold up regardless of what team he’s coached. More than the wins and losses, those patterns can tell a more detailed story. The best coaches are supposed to extract more from less than their contemporaries. For someone that’s been in the game as long as Tocchet has, one would expect him to have carved out a niche.

Understanding Tocchet’s preferred style of hockey comes down to risk tolerance. Hockey stakeholders are risk averse. With so much parity in the league today where most teams have little separation, the prospect of playing low-event and close games most nights is extremely enticing.

Over the course of Tocchet’s career, his teams have unequivocally prioritized defense over offense. That manifests in a few different ways. First of all, it means Tocchet coached teams are going to prefer the cycle over rush when it comes to their offense. It also means more often than not, a Tocchet team is going to spend a majority of the game in its own zone and try to keep opponents to lower quality shots.

Over the course of ten years, no Tocchet team has ever created expected goals at a league average rate. The trade off there is that they’ve never conceded a higher than league average rate of expected goals against. With roughly 80 percent of games taking place at even strength, these are large periods of times where his teams need to outperform their metrics.

It’s Tocchet’s design to keep every game close and the numbers bear that out. Over the average of all ten of his seasons as a coach, Tocchet’s teams generate 2.325 expected goals per 60 and concede 2.358 expected goals against. That differential is practically non-existent and speaks to the challenges his teams face offensively.

Tocchet’s teams play a challenging, difficult style of hockey. When a team consistently has the lesser share of offense over an extended period of time, they become reliant on their star players to override the environment.

It’s easier for a skilled player to overcome challenging circumstances. They need fewer scoring chances, they can be more efficient and score on lower quality chances. That’s what separates the game’s best from everyone else, they can do what the average player can’t.

It’s not a coincidence the single best season of Tocchet’s coaching career was the 2023-2024 Canucks. That team had the single highest even strength shooting percentage (10.6%) and second highest even strength save percentage (922.2) of any season in his career. That was the perfect storm of high end players like Elias Pettersson, J.T. Miller and Quinn Hughes in conjunction with Thatcher Demko in net were able to bring Tocchet’s vision to life.

The Caretaker Coach

It\'s unfair to pin the entirety of the Flyers\' malaise on Tocchet 52 games into his tenure. The roster is far from a finished product and a good portion of the lineup would fall into the developing category. But it would be awfully refreshing if Tocchet could occasionally throw the anxious public a bone. Tocchet statements about Matvei Mitchkov outnumber the forward\'s notable performances this season.

There hasn\'t been much of a change in the Flyers\' year over year results. If anything, the one real marked difference is the team getting better goaltending. Last year, Samuel Ersson a managed an .833 save percentage to Daniel Vladar\'s .904 this season.

Yet, on the same date last year, the Flyers had only one fewer win. With such an improvement in net from the team\'s starting goalie, plus a year of seasoning for holdovers from last year in conjunction with Tocchet\'s arrival, it was plausible to feel optimistic about the direction of the franchise.

Instead, with 30 games to go, the Flyers likely need something in the ball park of 19 wins to make the postseason. That would put Philadelphia right at the 95 point threshold which has historically been the cutoff point. The Flyers would need to manage a .633 points percentage the rest of the way, this season they\'re at .548.

For Tocchet\'s preferred style to work, he needs more high end talent and he needs to unleash it. With the playoffs unlikely this year, barring a heater, Tocchet needs to focus on setting next year\'s team up for success.

Retread coaches find success across the league all of the time. The last two teams to win the Stanley Cup were helmed by Paul Maurice and Bruce Cassidy. In the 2010s, Mike Sullivan, Daryl Sutter, Joel Quenneville, Craig Berube and Barry Trotz all won Stanley Cups on a mulligan as coach.

The die isn\'t yet cast on Tocchet, but at 61 years old and ten seasons of evidence to boot, fan skepticism is valid.

Talking Points