Chronically nepotistic Flyers hire Rick Tocchet to join alumni Danny Brière and Keith Jones. Rebuild over.
In hiring Tocchet, the Flyers seem to be reverting to their flawed old mindset of trying to win now "at any cost with coaches and brass who bled orange and black."
Well, that was fast. Just like that, the Flyers are finished rebuilding.
Two years ago, the club announced a “New Era of Orange,” finally admitting that both its foundation of personnel and foundational philosophy of winning now at any cost with coaches and brass who bled orange and black had been flawed for the past decade, if not longer.
On Wednesday, first-time general manager Danny Brière, who set the Flyers record with 30 points in the 2010 playoff run, and first-time president Keith Jones, who saved Eric Lindros’ life in 1999 when he diagnosed Lindros’ internal bleeding in their shared hotel room, agreed to hire fellow alumnus Rick Tocchet, whose 232 goals are tied for 12th in team history.
» READ MORE: Sources: Flyers to hire former player Rick Tocchet as next head coach
Once again, the chronically, institutionally nepotistic Flyers are showing injudicious impatience. They’re hiring a 61-year-old coach at his fourth and perhaps final head-coaching stop, a man who will be justifiably desperate to win at all costs, to run a team that, despite the insistence of its front office, is years from winning anything.
As for Tocchet, he left a dysfunctional, directionless Vancouver Canucks franchise after 2½ seasons of modest success. He joins a more functional, better-directed Flyers franchise that seems at least two years from modest success.
This hiring starts a clock. Two years from now, if the Three Musketeers aren’t in the playoffs, their Comcast overlords surely will be looking for another trio, probably also alumni, which they will hand the keys to the once-proud franchise. Brière and Jones must be feeling some pressure — self-applied, institutional, outside, or all of the above.
Me?
I would’ve signed interim Brad Shaw to a two-year contract. He began coaching professionally 30 years ago, got his first NHL assistant gig 26 years ago, and played almost 1,000 games as a pro, 377 of them in the NHL. The players play hard for him — Travis Sanheim and Jamie Drysdale love him — he’s a decent person, he’s an egoless teacher, and, once the John Tortorella cancer was excised late in the season, Shaw, his top assistant, took over, and the team won five of its last nine games.
Also, expectations would be appropriate. As in, realistic. As in, a three-year path to the playoffs and a five-year path to contention.
Instead, the Flyers want to win now.
How?
They have no dependable goalie, they need a top-line center and a top-pair defenseman. The Eastern Conference is stacked. They draft sixth, and won’t receive any ready-made help at any of their positions of need in this draft, even if they package some of the seven picks they own in the first two rounds.
They are gambling, then, that current young players like Matvei Michkov, Tyson Foerster, and Bobby Brink will continue to ascend, and veterans like Travis Konecny, Sanheim, and captain Sean Couturier won’t crater.
» READ MORE: Rick Tocchet reactions: Some Flyers fans ‘hate the idea’ of an ex-player as coach; others call it a no-brainer
More than anything, they’re betting that the acquisition landscape in the coming weeks will somehow unfold to their benefit. They might rely on a splashy offer sheet to a restricted free agent like Buffalo Sabres center Ryan McLeod or New York Islanders defenseman Noah Dobson.
They’re hoping that goalie Sam Ersson isn’t as bad as he has sometimes looked, will probably add a veteran netminder via free agency or a trade, and pray that the deep, immovable Eastern Conference will form fissures that we now cannot foresee – and that they won’t form fissures that seem inevitable.
Who knows? It might work.
I like what Brière and Jones have done so far, but this move makes less sense to me than hiring either of them, and they had no NHL management experience aside from Brière’s season as special assistant to the GM. Tocchet‘s been coaching for 23 years.
Still, the hiring of Tocchet feels a lot like the hiring of Torts in 2022 by former GM Chuck Fletcher and the Three Wise Men — former Flyers advisers Bobby Clarke, Paul Holmgren, and Bill Barber — when the Flyers clearly were not ready to win. Tortorella was exactly the sort of disaster I predicted he would be.
The Tocchet Era probably won’t be quite as bad, but this feels a lot like a team convinced it can sell season tickets and sell its fan base on the premise that it is ready to win now.
The Flyers are not. They are not close.
I wish I could get more excited about them hiring Tocchet, who is a dynamic person and who was a spectacular player. That would not be an honest reaction. In nine seasons, Tocchet has proved an unremarkable coach. His teams have made the playoffs twice. Each time, they won one series.
Yawn.
I enjoy Tocchet, and he’ll be good for column writers, but he will probably be less than impactful for the skaters. As with Tortorella, the franchise is putting a hexagonal peg into a round hole. You might be able to force it in, but it‘s not really going to fit.
» READ MORE: Six things to know about Rick Tocchet, the Flyers' next head coach
I’ve known Tocchet for 30 years — before, during, and after his 2007 conviction for financing a sports gambling ring while an assistant coach for Wayne Gretzky in Phoenix, so this will be the second time he serves probation in Philadelphia. His involvement in the scheme, along with other transgressions, resulted in a suspension from the NHL by commissioner Gary Bettman. Fortunately for society, Bettman let the intense, combustible, 18-year NHL winger back into the fraternity after two years.
Now, like so many Flyers before him — Holmgren, Barber, and Craig Berube — Tocchet is the familiar face of the franchise in Philly.
If nothing else, this should be fun.