The word “rebuild” has bounced off the Philadelphia Flyers and their echo chamber walls for the last nine years since Ron Hextall was appointed general manager in 2014. Though nearly a decade later the Flyers are a significantly worse team than they were when Hextall took over and have no clear road forward. A completely backwards approach under Ol’ Hexy followed by whatever the hell Chuck Fletcher was doing over the last four years has left a messy situation for new GM Danny Briere to figure out.
Briere has repeatedly said the Flyers are once again in a rebuild, but follows that up by saying it’s not a fire sale. With the oxymoron difficult to ignore, it forces the question as to what exactly the new-look front office has planned for the upcoming offseason?
Now, the Flyers roster isn’t exactly built like a typical “rebuilding” squad. They have a relatively young core in place, but most of their veterans are on unappealing contracts that can’t be sold off easily. Seven of their 13 main roster forwards last season were 25 years or younger (Konecny, Farabee, Tippett, Allison, Laczynski, Cates, Frost) not including Tyson Foerster and Elliot Desnoyers who were only up for a cup of coffee. That also doesn’t take into consideration that fact that 30-year-old Sean Couturier and 34-year-old Cam Atkinson were on the shelf all season with injuries.
Writing off a fire sale theoretically takes moving their young core guys like Owen Tippett, Joel Farabee and Noah Cates off the table, but shouldn’t disqualify slightly older players like Travis Konecny and Ivan Provorov, both now 26 years old, from being sold for assets.
It also means guys like Kevin Hayes, Sean Couturier, Cam Atkinson and the recently extended Travis Sanheim should be for sale as well, but they are all on ugly, long-term deals that are going to be pretty much impossible to trade away in the lingering flat cap era.
So if a majority of their veteran core is immovable and their young pillars are in place but far away from being a competitive team with no immediate help on the horizon, what exactly is their plan moving forward?
There’s a big difference between a proactive rebuild with a timeline and end goal in mind and just wasting an excessive amount of time stuck in neutral hoping for some draft luck to go their way and get rewarded for their inaction.
Hextall tried the latter, and it was a miserable failure. He put way too many eggs in the basket of drafting and development, leaving the main roster to rot without any substantial outside help. That roster at the time featuring guys in their primes like Claude Giroux, Sean Couturier, Wayne Simmonds, Brayden Schenn, Jake Voracek and more. They didn’t get an inkling of outside help until Hextall signed James Van Riemsdyk in 2018, four years after he showed up, which ended up being more of a headache than a reward as JVR was the big fish in a very shallow free agent pond.
Fast forward to this season and the young guys like Tippett, Frost and Cates all had very solid campaigns. Tippett scored 27 goals and 49 points, Frost had a career best 19 goals and 46 points and Cates scored 38 points while developing into one of the premier young two-way forwards in the league.
But if this team gets run back mainly in its entirety, can the same players continue to grow on their own?
If you’re a regular Brotherly Puck reader, you know we’ve explored adding Timo Meier, Alex DeBrincat, Tyler Bertuzzi and in a more extreme case Leon Draisaitl over the last few weeks (much to the fan’s chagrin on social media.)
It’s not to throw away the idea of a rebuild, but it’s to expedite the process and get the most out of their young players currently on the roster.
Cutter Gauthier, who balled out for Team USA at the World Championship, is returning to college for the 2023-24 season, but will more than likely make the professional jump in 2024-25. He represents the organizations current top prospect, forming a tandem with whoever the Flyers take seventh overall next at the upcoming 2023 draft.
Is surrounding Gauthier with a bunch of players who have never hit 50 points in their career the best move to get the most out of him? Or do you want your top prospect centering wingers who regularly post point-per-game seasons like Alex DeBrincat and Timo Meier?
The new-look front office’s approach to this season will greatly determine what we’re in for over the next few years. It’s time for the Flyers to step up and pick a direction. They’ve lived in the one-foot-in one-foot-out mentality for too long.
If they get cold feet selling Konecny or Provorov, come up with excuses for not moving Hayes or DeAngelo, and just sit back and watch during free agency and walk away empty handed and this team gets run back mainly in its entirety, it’s just more wasted time with zero actual progression towards an end goal.
Adding one or two outside players that can elevate the current team isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t blow their salary cap to smithereens or empty the asset pipeline.
Alex DeBrincat is 25, the same age as a bulk of the forwards already here. He’s averaged 31 goals a season in his career, eclipsing the 40-goal plateau twice. That’s not a bad addition for a team that was 29th in the league in goals per games played in 2022-23 with a miserable 2.68 and just 220 total goals.
If he shows up, produces at his normal clip, and carries Frost and Tippett to better seasons too, what’s the problem?
With any luck, Danny Briere and new President Keith Jones will do something to differentiate themselves from the previous regimes that steered the team to failure. They don’t even need to make additions, a few smart trades to sell roster players, acquire assets and open main roster spots for some of their top prospects would work just as well when it comes to pointing themselves in the direction of an end goal. The organization desperately needs a different approach to succeed, now we just have to hope the rookie front office staff are up to the momentous challenge in front of them.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: nhl.com
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