When the current Flyers regime took over in May of this past year, stating their intentions to kick off a rebuild that this organization has really never seen in its history, we didn’t know what sort of steps they’d take in changing their roster. We learned pretty quickly that the answer was “get rid of the guys John Tortorella wanted to get rid of and keep basically everyone else.” Ivan Provorov, Tony DeAngelo, and Kevin Hayes were all either bought out or traded for different things, and the Flyers otherwise filled out their roster on the margins and ran back a group that finished seventh from the bottom of the 2022-23 standings.
The question from that point (and even before it, as it seemed clear from the outset that a Tortorella-led team was never going to engage in a full-on, Chicago-style bottoming out and tanking effort) is the one that this team has been, or at least should have been, asking itself from the outset: how do we as a franchise get the high-end, team-changing talent that we so obviously need?
The 2023 draft was about as good of a start as one could’ve asked for. Taking Matvei Michkov, a guy with legitimate generational upside who most likely will not be able to play in the NHL for three years, is pretty much the definition of a high-upside rebuild move. On top of that, William Gauthier looked like he had taken a step forward from his draft year, and was establishing himself as one of the best prospects in that 2022 draft class as the team thought he’d be. But with a franchise that didn’t have a ton of extra draft equity sitting around, a roster that was just run-of-the-mill bad the year prior rather than true-bottom-of-the-league bad (not to mention one that would be getting back a potential top-6 if not top-line center in Sean Couturier), and a prospect group that was gaining new pieces but didn’t have any guys that profiled as potential game-changers other than the aforementioned Michkov and Gauthier, it was more than fair to wonder how the Flyers were going to get that high-end talent that they know they need.
Without tearing things down and trading key veteran contributors, the most likely path to getting another potential franchise-changer was for the Flyers’ roster to be bad enough that they could fall further down the standings, and maybe even into position where they could actually win the draft lottery. Well, here we are: it’s mid-February, and the Flyers are more likely than not to make the playoffs this season. They’re not bad, definitely not bad enough for any of that.
Now, I’m not here to fume and stomp my feet about the Flyers playing well. For one, sports are supposed to be fun and watching my favorite hockey team win games is fun. It has, in fact, been very fun to watch the Flyers this year. But even in the big-picture view, it’s obvious that for whatever limitations this roster has, it’s not a bottom-of-the-league-caliber group. Getting mad that a team isn’t worse than its roster talent suggests it should be frankly feels like a waste of time and energy.
But if it wasn’t already clear how narrow the tightrope that they’re walking right now is, it’s going to become even moreso in the three weeks between now and the trade deadline.
When a team blows it up and tanks, they are making their order of operations pretty clear: get the elite players, and then start winning around them. The Flyers, in going about things the way they are, have essentially said they’re going to try and do things in reverse: build a winning culture without elite players, then get the remaining elite players that they need and seamlessly integrate them into that culture.
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