The discrepancy in delivery from the two men who spoke on behalf of the Philadelphia Flyers organization on Thursday morning was striking, to say the least.
First up was John Tortorella, a veteran NHL coach in his first year behind the bench for the Flyers. And as usual, Tortorella did not mince words in calling the Flyers’ situation exactly like he sees it.
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“Where we’re at as a team, we are grassroots, as far as teaching,” Tortorella said. “We are just beginning to teach. Even when we get healthy and get some guys in, we’re just beginning.”
Wait, grassroots? Just beginning?
“This isn’t a one-year type of thing,” he continued. “We’ve got some work to do. And it’s gonna take some time, no matter what people want to hear out here. It’s going to take some time to get this right.”
That sure sounds like the definition of the word that, to this point, the Flyers have seemingly been terrified to use: rebuild. So is that what this is, at least in Tortorella’s mind?
“I’m not a big language guy. I like building,” he responded. “I like using building words. I like seeing things built and I am thrilled that right now, I have the opportunity to help there.”
OK, Tortorella may have used the word “build” instead of “rebuild.” But at long last, a key figure with the Flyers is finally admitting that the situation can’t be resolved with a relatively quick fix, that they’re at the grassroots, that it’s going to be a multiple-year process to return the club to respectability.
So is it a rebuild now, Chuck Fletcher?
“Again, there are labels,” he responded about 45 minutes later in a separate session. “I think if you look at it, we have worked at some young pieces over the last few years, we’ve talked over the last couple of years about needing more high-end talent, we’ve certainly tried to address some of that through the draft. So we have certainly tried to be aggressive in adding some young talent. And we’ve tried to find a way to add some pieces here to keep us competitive. So I’m not sure what the label is for that.”
There isn’t a label for the “middle ground” path described once again Thursday by the Flyers general manager. And that’s part of the problem.
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Tortorella, to his credit, isn’t sugarcoating things. As the new face in the organization, what he sees is a situation that isn’t going to get better anytime soon, a situation that will require years of hard work to fix. In other words, he’s talking to the fans as if they’re also watching the games, and also understand a hard truth: the Flyers just don’t have the talent to compete for anything meaningful. He’s being honest with them.
“I love the opportunity that we have here, to build something from really the ground up,” Tortorella said. “And when you’re feeling some pain — and we’re gonna feel more pain, we’re gonna go through a lot of pain — when you start feeling that pain, do you change your thinking and panic and readjust how you’re going to go about it? That’s the important part for us in this organization. Just stay with it, no matter how much pain you’re going through, stay with it. Because when you get on the other side, that foundation is going to be strong, you’re not going to be knee-jerk and back and forth.”
While the references to “a lot of pain” might seem pessimistic, in truth, Tortorella on Thursday was still selling a vision of optimism — of hard-earned, long-term optimism, to be sure, but optimism all the same. It was merely a far more realistic version of optimism than Flyers fans have heard in a long time.
Fletcher, on the other hand, continued to try to put lipstick on a pig.
“So I think there’s a path forward here to be more competitive, and I expect to be more competitive the rest of the way,” Fletcher said. “We’re five points out of a wild card spot now. We’ll see. We’ll see if we have the capability of staying in that race and competing.”
Technically, Fletcher was correct — on Thursday morning, his club was five points out of a wild card spot (they’re now six points out). But in this case, “technically correct” was the worst kind of correct. The Flyers just had a 10-game losing streak. They have the third-worst record in the Eastern Conference, and entered Thursday’s game with the Tampa Bay Lightning with the NHL’s seventh-worst points percentage. The suggestion that Philadelphia is a mere “five points” away from making the postseason, while technically true, is the epitome of failing to see the forest for the trees.
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This Flyers team just isn’t good enough. And no, the situation can’t solely be blamed on injuries.
“I do expect us to continue to defend well, and continue to compete, and continue to be a hard team to play against,” Fletcher said. “I mean, our issue is scoring goals, and will (Travis) Konecny and JVR (James van Riemsdyk) and hopefully (Cam) Atkinson help? They should. They were our three leading goal scorers last year, so they should help. And then, we can get a better sense of are we in the mix? Or are we not?”
No one is denying that injuries have hit the Flyers hard. That’s a fact. But Thursday night, the Flyers continued to get reinforcements. Scott Laughton was in his second game back from a shoulder issue. Tony DeAngelo checked back in after missing Tuesday’s game. And top scorer Konecny returned from his hand injury, even scoring a goal in the process.
The result? A 4-1 shellacking at the hands of the powerhouse Lightning, who over the course of a two-goal second period that saw Tampa Bay post a 17-2 shots on goal advantage, served up an impossible-to-miss reminder that injury returnees aren’t going to save this Flyers club alone. Even with some of their key absences back, they were still completely overmatched.
“That’s not the reason tonight,” Tortorella acknowledged with regard to the injuries still facing the club. “Everybody talks about the youth and the injuries. This had nothing to do with injuries, youth. We got some key guys back. Got some good goaltending. This is a situation we just need to learn from. That’s the only way I’m going to look at this. It’s not to berate them and kick and spit and yell — there’s no need for that. We need to learn what momentum swings are about and there’s one staring us in our face tonight.”
Tortorella has certainly proven in the past that he’s more than willing to berate and kick and spit and yell if he feels his team’s play warrants it. That he isn’t doing so right now speaks volumes. It speaks to a recognition of the reality of the situation, a reality that Fletcher — and perhaps by extension, ownership — still haven’t accepted.
That a rebuild is necessary. And that in fact, the Flyers are already in one.
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The number of key pieces that even a healthy Flyers team lacks is extensive. They don’t have any clear-cut first-line players aside from Sean Couturier, and who knows if he’ll be able to return from his second back surgery the same player he was even in 2020-21 and when that might be. They need a No. 1 defenseman, and in truth, neither Ivan Provorov nor Travis Sanheim may be No. 2s on a good team, either. Their presumptive No. 2 center is playing on the wing right now because the new coach thinks a 23-year-old natural left wing rookie is better defensively down low than he is. Their two best veteran wingers are a) hurt with a mystery injury and b) hurt and on an expiring contract that no one expects the team to extend. Their four most promising unproven youngsters at the NHL level (Owen Tippett, Noah Cates, Wade Allison and Egor Zamula) probably top out as second-line/second-pair players in a best-case scenario.
The roster was bad enough last year to earn the organization a top-five pick. It’s at least going to be bad enough this year to probably get the Flyers a top-10 pick. You know what kinds of clubs end up with top-10 draft picks in two consecutive years? Rebuilding ones.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some positive developments this season. Over the summer, Fletcher rightfully prioritized the reimplementation of structure, of compete, of work ethic after a truly embarrassing 2021-22 campaign. And the players, to their credit, have responded to that mandate. With only a few rare exceptions — the San Jose game in late October, the Pittsburgh Black Friday debacle — it’s abundantly clear that these Flyers players this year are trying. They’re hustling, they’re blocking shots, they’re backchecking and diving around and battling for loose pucks and getting in more fights than any other club in the league.
The fact that despite all that effort, they’ve still lost double the games that they’ve won speaks to just how deep the problems with their roster go. Tortorella is getting about all he can out of this roster — and this is all they have.
Yikes.
On some level, it makes sense that Fletcher is still trying to sell the possibility of the playoffs and competitiveness, as ridiculous as especially the former might seem. After all, measurable improvement in 2022-23 was the offseason goal, the directive from ownership that Fletcher is looking to meet in order to keep his job. My understanding is that a large part of the reason why no one seems willing to use the word “rebuild” out loud is because ownership has yet to officially rubber-stamp its public usage or the plan itself — they’re still not quite ready to pull the plug on the idea that somehow, some way, this can be salvaged without a full-scale blow-up.
But in truth, a “rebuild” doesn’t have to mean that the front office has to trade away every asset not nailed down, though that’s certainly one plausible path. At its core, committing to a rebuild simply means a shift in organizational mindset. It means no more trading first-round picks away for Rasmus Ristolainen, and then rather than attempting to recoup some of that draft capital at the ensuing deadline, doubling down on a poor initial decision by signing him to a $25.5 million long-term contract. It means holding onto mid-round picks rather than tossing three of them at Carolina to acquire DeAngelo. It means not giving a soon-to-be 27-year-old an eight-year contract, knowing full well that long-term deals which stretch into a player’s mid-30s provide the bulk of their value in the early years, when a “rebuilding” team won’t have much use for it.
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It means, in short, no more band-aids. It means a good, hard look in the mirror, and an acceptance of it as it truly is.
It means, in other words, exactly what on Thursday, Tortorella said he wants to do anyway.
“I feel very strongly that you just get stuck in the mud if you continue to put band-aids on, and gimmicks to get people in the building, and whatever it is you’re trying to get,” he said. “You get people in the building and you get it right by winning. And the only way you can win is building it the proper way. And that’s how I’m going to go about it.”
Which brings us to the job status of person who has been applying all of those band-aids only to find himself stuck in the mud — Fletcher himself.
Fletcher was asked Thursday morning if he was concerned about his job security, and whether he would be around to see through the conclusion of his plan to return the Flyers to relevancy. And while Fletcher initially cut the tension with a joke, he appears to know that he’s on thin ice.
“No, I don’t worry about that stuff at all,” Fletcher said. “I talk to (Comcast Spectacor chairman and CEO) Dave Scott all the time. We had a couple-hour meeting yesterday, and talked about everything and the different possibilities that can happen as the season goes forward. And we’re all on the same page. But look, I understand the business. So my focus is on doing what’s right for the team going forward. And that’s all I do.”
There’s still empathy for Fletcher within Flyers HQ, a belief that he’s been hit with a ridiculous amount of misfortune out of his control over the past few seasons. And at this point, my guess is that Scott and the rest of the Comcast brass aren’t quite ready yet to pull the trigger on removing him — they’d prefer to see this team with most of the injured pieces back (sans Couturier and Ellis) before making a final decision on Fletcher’s immediate status. In a perfect world, they’d like to use 2022-23 as an evaluation year — not just for the team, but also for the front office and its vision for the club.
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That said, barring a major turnaround on the part of the roster over the final five months of the season, it’s getting extremely difficult to imagine Fletcher returning as GM in 2023-24. Fletcher’s continued public endorsement of his “middle ground” retooling strategy Thursday served as a strong hint that if ownership did fully and publicly pivot to the “rebuild” language, Fletcher would not be a part of said pivot. And while I still believe that it’s Comcast’s preference to give the Flyers as much time as possible to convince them that the full-fledged rebuild they’d prefer not to execute isn’t actually necessary, circumstances might force their hands.
Yes, the Flyers ended their 10-game losing streak on Tuesday. But is 15 losses in 16 games really that much better (next up: New Jersey, Colorado, Washington and Vegas)? What about 18 in 20, assuming the Flyers earn a victory over the Arizona Coyotes on Dec. 11 while penciling them in for losses against all of the other (superior-on-paper) clubs they’ll face through Dec. 17?
Does Comcast have the stomach for that? I’m skeptical.
In the meantime, the Flyers’ two public faces painted two starkly different pictures of the immediate future of the club. One was still selling the possibility of a surprise surge fueled by the return of injured players and improved competitiveness. The other went as far as possible to the line of describing a taboo word without actually stating the word.
“As far as language, you can call it whatever the hell you want,” Tortorella said. “I know how this coaching staff is going to go about it, and whatever word you want to use, you can use.”
It’s high time the Flyers started using that actual word, and accepted the implications that go along with it.
(Photo: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)