Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports
The Philadelphia Flyers made the news for the wrong reason last week, but their on-ice product has been better than many expected. And usually, that’s great news. The players and coaching staff certainly don’t want to lose.
After a Dec. 23 loss to Carolina that gave them an 11-7-7 record, the Flyers have gone 9-4-0 – a points percentage that’s a vast improvement over their current .490 overall output (and a 20-21-7 record) this season.
However, all that winning has pushed them to… uh… seventh place in the Metropolitan Division. They went from 11 points behind the sixth-place New York Islanders to four points.
But the Flyers have lucked out on a relatively easy schedule – four of their nine wins of late have come against NHL sad sacks, including Anaheim (twice), Arizona and San Jose – and all the teams above them in the Metro are going to be playing each other rather often, meaning Philly will have to improve on that 9-4-0 run just to have an outside shot at a playoff berth.
And there’s the problem – the Flyers haven’t moved anywhere in their division and aren’t rebuilding right now, but they are on course to finish 13th in the Eastern Conference and 24th in the NHL. You know what we call that area, right?
Regular readers will remember that we’ve talked for many a year now about the league’s mushy middle – the place in the standings where they’re not good enough to make the post-season, yet not terrible enough to finish at the bottom of the league and guarantee themselves a dynamic young player to build around. It’s the worst place to be for a team, but Philadelphia management appears to be hell-bent on trying to beat the odds – and for what? To get steamrolled in the first round? To be at the ninth spot in the East and finish one or two points for eighth?
No, this seems like the best situation would be the Flyers joining the Tanks R Us brigade, meaning you work towards the future and deal away whatever non-core assets you have. The problem with this particular team is that they keep trying to think that this team can go on a deep playoff run with a few tweaks. Regular league whisperers think GM Chuck Fletcher could eventually be replaced by former Flyers star forward Daniel Briere. But if the Flyers continue to delay changing GMs, soon enough, they’ll be Vancouver East – in other words, a mess upstairs and on the playing surface.
Fletcher has players many other teams have an interest in, including pending unrestricted free agent veterans James van Riemsdyk and Justin Braun, and rumored disgruntled defenseman Ivan Provorov. But in dealing away at least two of those three, Fletcher would be tacitly admitting his roster deserves more tearing down than building up. And again, at that point, Flyers ownership would be endorsing what Fletcher has done thus far by allowing him to continue to make important decisions about their future.
You can understand, then, why Flyers fans are more concerned than normal. Their antennae can pick up the lack of direction, and quickly move in despair after that. They’d prefer to see the team admit things just aren’t going to work ideally with this group of talent and begin the major roster construction quickly thereafter.
Fletcher has had four years on the job as GM, and the Flyers have missed out on playoff hockey in three of those seasons. Aside from 2019-20, when they finished second in the Metro, they haven’t finished higher than sixth. It would make sense if they were rebuilding, but they aren’t.
Unless a minor miracle happens in the next couple of months, that number will grow into four playoff misses in five years. That’s unacceptable. The mushy middle stinks. They need a new architect, a new vision and a new plan, and they need all of it as soon as possible. Anything else will be an Orange-and-Black mirage.
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