Final day of the month? Perfect time for a Flyers mailbag.
By this time in March, the NHL trade deadline will have passed, and the future of the Philadelphia Flyers will become just a bit clearer. For now, however, the fan base is in something of a waiting game. Will Claude Giroux waive his no-movement clause and be traded? What other players may be on their way out by March 21? And what does it all mean for the organizational plan come the summer?
Unsurprisingly, this mailbag is largely focused on that murky future.
Note: Questions may be edited for clarity and style.
Charlie, curious on your own personal opinions on tanking, either this season or as a concept in general? Is it a worthwhile strategy? On one hand, you get the success stories of the Toronto Maple Leafs, on the other, the Buffalo Sabres. How about for the Flyers in the next little while? — Zach M.
It really depends on how one is defining the word “tank.”
If we’re talking about intentional, “strip it down to the bare bones and openly try to lose” types of tanks? Personally, I don’t think they work too well. To be clear — as a one, even maybe two-year strategy, it can be a worthwhile gambit. But teams that utterly gut their rosters — the Buffalo Sabres are an obvious example — with the goal of loading up on top picks for 3-5 seasons don’t tend to get results. Unintentional “tanks,” on the other hand? Those work quite often.
People often point to the Toronto Maple Leafs as an example of a successful tank. But they really only intentionally bottomed out one time — 2015-16, the year that ended with them nabbing Auston Matthews. The 2013-14 team (ultimately picked ninth and took William Nylander) very much was trying to make the playoffs, and was right in the mix until an utter collapse in March and April. The 2014-15 team was also expected — at least by architect Dave Nonis and head coach Randy Carlyle — to contend for a postseason berth as well. Sure, the Leafs ended up being terrible and getting Mitch Marner as a result. But that wasn’t their goal. Their organizational brain trust thought they had constructed a good hockey team. They were just extremely wrong in that belief, and the result was an awful standings finish.
But the positive was that, when the next wave of young players gained in an unintentional tank hits the NHL, they’re not entering a club totally devoid of talent. They’re entering a fundamentally flawed roster, sure, otherwise the team wouldn’t have lost all of those games in the first place. But the Matthews/Marner/Nylander trio had good players like Morgan Rielly, Nazem Kadri, Tyler Bozak, Jake Gardiner and James van Riemsdyk to provide legitimate support in those early years when the Maple Leafs pivoted from joke to “team on the rise,” and ease that necessary transition. Tearing your team down to the studs means those support guys are gone, and the onus is entirely on a bunch of teenagers to turn a team into a contender. That’s a lot to ask of even very talented young players. I suspect this is part of what went wrong in Buffalo.
But there’s a flip side to this, and it’s something that people in Philadelphia might not realize, simply because their local team hasn’t done it — either intentionally or unintentionally. Most NHL teams have gone through an extended “tanking” period in the post-lockout (after 2004) period.
Want to know how many NHL teams have made at least three picks in the top-10 of the NHL Draft over a four-year span since the mid-2000s? A whopping 23 of them. That’s about 72 percent of NHL clubs who have gone through significant, uninterrupted periods of on-ice ineptitude and were granted multiple cracks at nabbing high-end draft talent as a result. Remove the two recent expansion teams (Vegas and Seattle) from the equation, and we’re talking about just seven franchises that haven’t “bottomed out” since 2004, at least in terms of acquiring draft capital: Boston, Montreal, St. Louis, Nashville, Dallas, San Jose and your Philadelphia Flyers.
So how did those teams get stars? They either lucked out big time later in the draft (Boston with David Pastrnak, St. Louis with Vladimir Tarasenko), nailed their rare high pick (Dallas with Miro Heiskanen) or simply didn’t get any true young no-doubt-about-it stars. And it doesn’t strike me as a coincidence that the only two teams in this group who have won the Cup since 2004 are the “lucky drafters.”
In summation — while intentional tanks rarely work unless they are short in length and highly targeted, unintentional tanks not only have a track record of success, they’re also a natural part of the lifecycle of an NHL team in the salary cap era. Perhaps the Flyers are just finally due for their turn having a true down period.
In a lot of comments and speculation out there, Travis Konecny’s name pops up a good bit. I find it hard to believe that management would think a roster without him (especially in the “retooling” mindset they have) would be better as I think he plays similar to Tyler Bertuzzi or Brad Marchand, and find his game to be very unique. Do you think he should still be regarded as part of this core or would you move him, and if so, what would you have him bring back? — Connor F.
I certainly don’t think that Travis Konecny has to be traded. I also, however, don’t view him to be at the level of a “core piece.”
He did look like he was becoming one in 2019-20, when he was the Flyers’ top scorer and very much looked the part of a guy who could be somewhere in the realm of the second to fourth best player on a contending team — not quite superstar level but a very effective top-of-the-lineup offensive weapon.
Since then, of course, he has 19 goals in his last 100 regular season games, after going goal-less in 16 bubble playoff games. His underlying even strength metrics have returned to break-even, “fine” levels as well after his monster 2019-20 campaign when he graded out as one of the better play-driving wingers in hockey. That’s not a useless player — for the past two seasons, Konecny has been a perfectly viable 50-point-a-year forward who provides extra value as an agitator. But it’s not the resume of a player that a team builds around or makes untouchable. To me, he now looks like he’s ideally in the fifth to seventh best forward range on a stacked Stanley Cup contender — a good second-liner or an incredible third-liner.
That said, the idea of trading Konecny for future assets seems ridiculous, especially if Flyers GM Chuck Fletcher has designs on trying to turn this team around quickly. Konecny is the type of player that every playoff team wants — a high-energy sparkplug with real offensive skill who gets under the skin of the opposition. If you’re going to trade Konecny, it better be in a package for an impact defenseman or a star-level forward. Otherwise, I’d probably just keep him. It’s not like his contract is a bad one, and I do expect his goal scoring pace will improve eventually, as he’s not going to keep shooting 6.1 percent despite a career rate of 11.8 percent forever.
Was there ever any effort to improve the roster during the season? At some point, you have to realize icing 6-8 AHL/borderline NHL players is not sustainable. It seems like management gave up on the season two weeks after firing Vigneault. — Rob C.
It’s a fair point. After all, the Flyers have iced a very limited roster especially since December, when COVID-19 started to hit the team hard and all of Ryan Ellis, Kevin Hayes and Sean Couturier were ruled out for the foreseeable future. The Flyers have never really had their projected roster — a point that an exasperated Cam Atkinson made Friday after practice — but by January, almost half of their nightly lineup consisted of call-ups and waiver claims. It’s absolutely true that kind of roster isn’t going to win many games.
But it’s not willful negligence that prevented the Flyers from reacting in a dramatic way from a roster construction standpoint to the situation. It’s largely because cap realities still exist. Yes, players can be placed on long-term injured reserve, opening up cap allowance that could be used to replace said players, so in theory, if the Flyers wanted to trade for an expensive defenseman to replace Ryan Ellis, they could fit him. So why didn’t they? Because at some point — whether this year or (most likely) next — those original injured players are going to come back, and will need to fit under the cap ceiling.
So it’s not just as simple as trading for another $6 million defenseman to replace Ellis, or even a $3 million defenseman who may not have fully replaced him but would have at least been better than Nick Seeler and Kevin Connauton. Any player with term beyond the 2021-22 season would have to be acquired with an action plan in place to fit him under the salary cap beyond this season, which would require the eventual jettisoning of current players on the roster and a total loss of leverage in future negotiations (because every other team would know that the Flyers would have to clear space to ultimately become cap compliant again). And what about rental players, who could have helped this year and not been a cap issue beyond 2021-22? The teams that have those either were still trying to chase down a playoff spot in December and January or preferred to wait until closer to the deadline to aggressively shop their rentals, when prices would logically increase due to increased demand.
Did Fletcher explore the trade market in December and January? I’m sure he did, to a degree. But making impactful moves back then would have meant paying a premium (and for a team that desperately needs future assets given the overall state of the organization, that wouldn’t have made a lot of sense) and risking their already precarious future cap situation devolving into utter disaster. When a team gets hit with injuries in the first half of a season, its best move generally is to hope that organizational depth is strong enough to allow them to survive it. In this case, it wasn’t good enough — though in fairness, I’m not sure any club not named the Pittsburgh Penguins has the depth or straight up hockey magic necessary to thrive in the wake of injuries to its 1C, 2C and 1D.
How much of the Wild’s current success should be credited to Fletcher? Should that give us hope or despair for the future of his tenure here? — Aidan M.
It’s an interesting question, given that the Wild — while not a Stanley Cup favorite — are back to being solidly in contention in the Western Conference, and probably qualify as an intriguing dark horse at this point for a title. How much of Fletcher’s fingerprints do remain on that club? Has GM Bill Guerin completely shaped the club or are Fletcher’s “guys” still prevalent?
It’s a little of both, to be sure, but it’s fair to say that most of their “core” came from Fletcher.
To pinpoint the players actually driving the bus for Minnesota this season, let’s take a quick look at Evolving-Hockey’s Goals Above Replacement metric that attempts to measure player value. The Wild currently have 17 players with at least 2.0 worth of GAR — in other words, providing measurable positive value to the club. Let’s see how many of them came from Fletcher.
Eight of the 17 players providing real value to the Wild in 2021-22 were originally acquired by Fletcher, including their top winger, top center, three most heavily used defensemen and best-performing goalie (Cam Talbot has more starts, but Kaapo Kahkonen has delivered superior results). So that’s not too bad.
Some caveats here. First, while Fletcher and AGM Brent Flahr did discover and draft current Wild star Kirill Kaprizov, they were unable to convince him to sign and come over to North America; that was Guerin who scored that big organizational win. In addition, there’s an element of survivorship bias here — of course Guerin is going to keep the good players that Fletcher unearthed, and also he had a vested interest in holding onto the quality prime-age players that Fletcher added to the organization in order to stay. Over nearly 10 years running the team, Fletcher and his front office was going to dig up some quality players — Guerin still was the one who built around them to create this version of the Wild.
That said, this exercise does hint at two positive things for Fletcher and in turn, the Flyers. One, that Guerin does owe Fletcher quite a lot in putting together his club. And two, Fletcher’s drafting in Minnesota was pretty solid in terms of constructing a solid core and also digging up a legitimate star in Kaprizov.
Do the Flyers remove the interim tag for Mike Yeo in the offseason given his approach for the process? Or do rumors of Rick Tocchet (or someone else) come up as the season winds down? — Michael H.
There were a lot of questions this month asking who will be the Flyers’ coach in 2022-23 and wanting me to rattle off potential names. Given that the Flyers have already announced that Yeo will be the coach through the rest of this season — and this season still has two months remaining — I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds of speculation on who the next coach will be. There will be plenty of time for that in the immediate aftermath of the season.
That said, the reality of the situation is that the team has a 7-16-6 record with Yeo in charge. As noted above, I do think the Flyers are making structural progress and Yeo has certainly stopped the bleeding in the sense that they’re no longer delivering truly embarrassing performances on the regular. But “we’re still losing a ton but no longer a dumpster fire” is not exactly a compelling case to be named full-time head coach. Yeo has a strong relationship with Fletcher, but Fletcher made it clear upon giving Yeo the interim tag that no promises were made to him regarding being named the full-time head coach. My guess is that it will be a similar situation as the one that played out in 2019, when interim coach Scott Gordon remained in the theoretical mix for the job but the Flyers did look elsewhere (and ultimately hired Alain Vigneault).
You can bring back a single Flyers player (past or present) in his prime to retool/rebuild around. Who do you pick and why? — Michael S.
Fascinating question. I’d say that — ironically, given the tension between the two that developed in the late-90s/early-00s — there are two acceptable answers to this one: Eric Lindros or Bobby Clarke.
The case for Lindros is simple. Prime-era Lindros was probably the best player in the NHL; prime-age Clarke — as great as he was — almost certainly was not. Recent rule adjustments making blindside, predatory hits less likely would likely extend Lindros’ prime and career, and there’s little concern that a physical freak like Lindros would be overwhelmed by the pace and style of play in 2020s NHL. Prime-era Lindros would immediately be one of the most physically dominant players in hockey today, and he’d have far more space to operate now than he did back in the 1990s, when he still averaged 1.36 points per game in the trap era from age 19 through 26 (82-game pace: 111.5 points). You think the Flyers need a superstar to be relevant again? Yeah, Lindros would qualify.
Clarke’s case isn’t weak either, though. For starters, while he wasn’t “the best” talent-wise of his era, he was still very, very good — three Hart Trophies in four years, three 100-plus point seasons, two consecutive 89-assist campaigns — and absolutely qualified as a franchise player. Second, there’s the leadership intangible. Clarke was the quintessential hockey captain, a player who embodied all the hockey cliches: “tough to play against,” “brings his team into the fight,” “does anything to win.” No slight against Lindros, but he just doesn’t measure up to Clarke in that regard. Finally, just as Lindros would have benefited from rule changes that (hopefully) would have cut down on the likelihood of suffering concussions, I suspect Clarke would have benefited from present-day advancements in the treatment and management of type 1 diabetes. We’re talking almost 50 years’ worth of scientific progress in that regard, which likely makes prime-age Clarke in 2022 a healthier, stronger and even more energetic player than he was in the 1970s.
The dramatic edge in physical ability does have me lean toward Lindros, and also the fact that I wonder if due to the way the culture around the game has changed over the years — Flyers aren’t going to a South Jersey dive bar to mingle with the fans after every game like they did in the Broad Street Bullies era — if Clarke wouldn’t be quite as impactful as captain today as he was back then (he’d still be very good, I just suspect it’s tougher these days to build that degree of comradery in an NHL team). But it’s a tough choice.
Given how much better Justin Braun is than Montreal defenseman Ben Chiarot, why do you think he is expected to get so much worse a return at the trade deadline? Are the Flyers somehow less good at “marketing” their trade bait? Does it all come back to GMs loving size, hits and PIMs instead of actual defense? Does it just come down to Chiarot playing with Shea Weber last year? I don’t get it. — Sharon G.
For starters, let’s take a quick look at the numbers to see if Sharon is correct in asserting that Braun has been significantly more valuable to the Flyers this season compared to Chiarot on the Canadiens.
OK, yeah. Sharon is certainly onto something here. Braun — at least by advanced metrics — has been a much better defensive defenseman in 2021-22 than Chiarot. But it’s Chiarot and not Braun who is consistently brought up as potentially bringing back to Montreal as much as a first-round pick as a plausible return. Why exactly is he being viewed so highly — or at least, so much higher than Braun?
I have a few theories.
First, Chiarot really impressed hockey people during the playoffs last year, and it was in large part because of one element that Chiarot brings that Braun really doesn’t — nastiness in the form of physicality. That’s not to say Braun is a soft defenseman; he’s certainly willing to do the dirty work in front of the net and retrieve pucks in corners under the weight of a heavy forecheck. But he’s just not the kind of assertive hitter that Chiarot often is, and that’s a characteristic GMs tend to really value heading into the playoffs — especially if one feels his team is lacking in that dimension. Chiarot also is averaging over three more minutes of ice time per night this season than Braun and is four years younger. Those factors won’t be lost on GMs.
But I do think the bulk of it boils down to hype, largely driven by Chiarot’s memorable postseason in 2021. If Chiarot does indeed seem poised to bring back a first-rounder, a shrewd GM would be wise to pull out of that bidding and nab Braun for a less valuable pick. That said, the problem here isn’t that Braun is being undervalued by the market — it’s more that Chiarot is being overvalued.
He’s kind of a good story in an otherwise dismal year, but realistically do you bring Gerry Mayhew back next season? Assuming he doesn’t get traded, and not really knowing who gets moved, does he fit anywhere on this team once healthy? I kind of feel like he deserves a shot — I love the energy he brings. — Timothy S.
The short answer? Sure, I’d bring back Mayhew. He won’t be expensive, his underlying numbers are fine and as the Flyers are learning the hard way this season, quality depth is pretty valuable. At the very least, Mayhew is showing that he can be a darn useful fill-in forward in the top-nine, and would be more talented than the vast majority of NHL fourth-liners.
That said, I do wonder where he would ultimately fit in a 2022-23 Flyers lineup.
It’s very true that the looming offseason could go in many different directions for the Flyers. But Mayhew’s current run has largely come in a middle-six role, and at least on paper, it’s difficult for me to imagine that he’d hold onto that role to start 2022-23, unless Fletcher chose to embark on a mass sell-off of the team’s top-nine forwards without adding any big names to replace them. That strikes me as unlikely. Would the Flyers coach be willing to put a 5-foot-9, sub-200 pound forward mostly known for racking up points in the AHL on an NHL fourth line? Frankly, I’d be in favor of the idea, but I’m skeptical most coaches would go down that road. He just doesn’t fit the mold that coaches usually look for in filling out a fourth line.
It wouldn’t at all shock me to see the Flyers re-sign Mayhew and give him a real shot to make the team out of training camp next September, as a nod to his surprising work this season. Nor would it shock me if at the end of camp, they looked to slip him through waivers and keep him in reserve as a priority call-up when a scorer succumbs to injury. That might be his long-term role here — though he has another two months to prove it should be larger than that.
The threshold question is if Giroux will waive his no-movement and agree to a trade at all. What do you think? — Tim P.
Ultimately, yes, I do think Giroux will waive his no-movement clause. His camp is already down the road of scouting out potential landing spots if Giroux does decide to waive, and that’s a pretty good sign that he will indeed make that decision. I get the sense that this is a decision that Giroux wishes he didn’t have to make and is probably dreading making that final call. But in the end, yes, I think this situation ends in a Giroux trade at the deadline.
Is there any chance of an ownership change? I don’t know Spectacor’s financials but sports teams have shown to be a risky investment in the past two years and attendance is down drastically. — Matt G.
Based on everything I’ve heard, Comcast Spectacor is not looking to sell. Would a bunch more years of spending lots of money on a team in the NHL basement with shrinking attendance change that? Sure, that’s possible. But my understanding is that Comcast remains committed to figuring this out.
The fact is that a competitive Flyers team is an absolute cash cow, and the prospect of getting to that point would be appealing to any company, Comcast included. They’ve also dumped a lot of money into modernizing the Wells Fargo Center and want to see a return on that investment. At least in the here and now, I’d be surprised if legitimate sales rumors started popping up.
Outside of Wright, who’s your favorite 2022 first-round draft prospect for the Flyers? — Sean O.
I haven’t really begun to dive into tape much yet — the whole covering an NHL team on a daily basis does make that difficult in-season — but based on what I’ve read and (more importantly) the conversations I’ve had with prospect watchers and scouts I trust have made me intrigued by Logan Cooley. He might not have as high of a floor as Wright, but I’ve had a lot of people tell me that he projects as much more dynamic forward. The Flyers certainly need one of those desperately.
Disregarding the possibility of lottery goofiness, if the season ended today the Flyers would draft fifth overall. In that draft position, is there still reasonable talent in this draft to hope for a franchise-type player of elite skills? And, if that player theoretically exists, does the recently stated swing in drafting philosophy (away from high-floor to more boom-or-bust picks) actually give you confidence we will select such a player? — Pete R.
Are there “franchise players” in this draft? There might be! The 2017 draft notoriously was viewed as one lacking hyper high-end impact talent, which was pointed out by pessimists in the Flyers fan base after the team jumped up to No. 2 in the lottery that year. As it turns out, they were right that Nolan Patrick (or even Nico Hischier) didn’t qualify as that caliber of player — but they were wrong in dismissing the class at large. Even in that weak draft, picks 3-5 (Miro Heiskanen, Cale Makar and Elias Pettersson) all are in that realm. Franchise players were there in that draft. The Flyers just didn’t get one.
My guess is that this draft will be similar. It doesn’t have a slam-dunk No. 1 pick virtually guaranteed to be a star in the Connor McDavid/Auston Matthews vein. But I fully expect more than one player taken in the top-10 will reach those heights. For example, I wouldn’t be shocked if any of Wright, Cooley, Matthew Savoie or Juraj Slafkovsky reach that level, though none are locks to achieve such a ceiling. That’s the difference between a decent draft and a great one.
(Photo of Cam Atkinson, Travis Konecny and Claude Giroux: Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)