It’s been a very fun and successful few years in the Philly sports scene… well at least for most of the teams. While everyone else is on the hunt for a championship and prosperity, the Flyers are like your boomer uncle who loves their flip phone from 2002- painfully behind the times. They’re currently mired in the worst three-year stretch in franchise history, and the truth is they’re completely on the back burner on the macro level of Philadelphia Sports.
The Eagles went 14-3 during the 2022-23 regular season and made a run all the way to the Super Bowl before ultimately losing to the Chiefs. They followed that up by opening the 2023-24 season 4-0 with aspirations to win it all this season.
The Phillies made an improbable run to the World Series but lost to the Astros in 2022. They then made a return to the postseason in 2023 in consecutive years for the first time in over a decade.
The Union went to the MLS Cup but lost to Los Angeles FC on the same day the World Series ended and are on the hunt to make the playoffs again in 2023.
Bryce Harper won the National League MVP in 2021, Joel Embiid won the NBA MVP in 2023 and Jalen Hurts was a runner-up for the NFL MVP in 2022.
Outside of a Selke Trophy won by Sean Couturier in 2020 and Claude Giroux’s Hart Trophy snubbing in 2014 and again in 2018, the trophy case has been barren dating back to at least the 1990’s and in most cases the late 80s. Robert Esche and Roman Cechmanek splitting the William Jennings Trophy with Martin Brodeur in 2002-03 is as close to a recent award as they have.
The Flyers are less than seven months away from the 10th anniversary of the hiring of Ron Hextall as general manager, a move that with the benefit of hindsight was the kiss of death for the once-proud organization. He, Dave Scott and later Chuck Fletcher and Val Camillo would spend much of the next decade slowly destroying the heart of the team, letting both the strong culture as well as the on-ice product slip into irrelevancy.
The Sixers made “the process” cool, which again, with the benefit of hindsight hasn’t gone nearly as well as anticipated. The Process is nothing more than an excuse for flagrant mismanagement of an organization under the guise of there being a super secret path to winning even if the general public can’t see it. It’s the super villain origin story for supporting losing and overlooking the short term lack of responsibility.
The solution to success is right under their noses. Kevin Costner said it best- build it and they will come. The problem is, it’s significantly easier said than done. There hasn’t been an inkling that the Flyers have any interest in saving themselves. They haven’t actively attempted to produce a better product since the heyday of Paul Holmgren well over a decade ago. A feeling that was no more prevalent than when they told hometown hero Johnny Gaudreau to kick rocks during the 2022 offseason.
The Blue Jackets won the Gaudreau sweepstakes and immediately sold a couple million dollars worth of season tickets and undoubtedly made a pretty penny in jersey sales. Now imagine how that would’ve gone for the Flyers, who are starved for a talented player, especially one who is a hometown kid. The NHL is a business, after all. Making money from jersey and ticket sales should be the name of the game, but the Flyers couldn’t get out of their own way when it mattered most.
Was a seven-year, $68 million contract the smartest from a hockey standpoint? Maybe not, but it’s the exact kind of move that needed to be made from a business standpoint when the foundation of the Flyers was crumbling right before their eyes. The talented hometown hero to sign with his childhood club and become the new face of the franchise in the post-Giroux era was exactly what the Flyers needed to prevent themselves from complete disaster. And Fletcher and his band of merry idiots in the front office didn’t do it.
When you have a player like that fall into your lap and actively choose to not tender him a contract, it’s comparable to refusing to get in a lifeboat on the Titanic, the team deserves the tragic fate that befell them. Can you imagine the Phillies turning down Mike Trout during their doldrum years of the mid-2010s?
With any luck, the new regime led by Danny Briere and Keith Jones actually breeds success. They’ve tried to rebuild some of the lost culture by restoring the old center ice logo, swapping jerseys similar to those of the beloved 90s era, and hiring fan favorite former Flyers to fill out the front office. Rehabbing their image is a good start by attempting to regrow the roots that kept fans attached to the team in the first place.
But the cosmetic changes that have momentarily made the fans happy is all for naught if they don’t fix the actual on-ice product, and more importantly, doing it with some level of urgency.
As of this writing we’re just a week away from the start of the 2023-24 season, and yet, there’s never been so little interest from a bulk of the fanbase. The Wells Fargo Center has been half empty since the pandemic restrictions ended, and as noted above, the Phillies and Eagles are both enjoying successful periods in their own history. Why the hell would anybody want to line up for a team that’s just about guaranteed to miss the playoffs when the Phillies are in the middle of their postseason and the Eagles are undefeated?
It’s the major problem with a decade of struggle- the anger turns into apathy. The fans went from begging the organization to change to accepting the fact that the dark cloud of irrelevancy isn’t going away anytime soon. So while the return of the double center ice logo is a feelgood reminder of days gone by, there’s a chance nobody cares about it in December because the team skating on it will be in the basement of the NHL.
The 2023-24 season will be all about turning up the pressure on their in-house options. Fully diagnosing what the coaching staff has at their disposal and who is a building block for the future and who is not. That means that (if they’re serious about rebuilding) the front office takes their findings from this season and addresses the situation with some kind of legitimacy next summer.
Putting a better product on the ice is the only way to start rebuilding the relationship with the lapsed fans. Using words like “rebuild” typically indicates an endgame of success. Yet, that word has been tossed around so carelessly by previous regimes that it ultimately boils down to an excuse to remain in idling in neutral. To avoid picking a direction and having to step and and make big decisions. If the Flyers enter next offseason timid and walk away more or less empty handed, trying to sell the same bill of goods about prospects and development (that they then continuously back out of) the current feel-good honeymoon period Danny Briere is in may come to a close much sooner than anticipated.
Unfortunately the Flyers don’t have a soft cap and luxury tax to add players like the MLB, or the quarter-billion cap and easy loopholes of the NFL. The NHL has been in a flat-cap era since the pandemic that will supposedly come to a close during the 2024 offseason with an early projection of a $5 million bump in the cap. It’s a minuscule increase for a league that has been suffocating for years. The financial struggles just means teams need to be extra careful, smart and creative with the way they spend money, all descriptors that don’t really fit the Philadelphia Flyers these days.
We live in an era where Philly sports are booming, yet the Flyers are akin to the Spongebob meme of Squidward standing in his house watching everyone else have fun. But they’ve got no one but themselves to blame for their incompetence. The New Era of Orange needs to be a new era. A repackaged brand of the same old shit just isn’t going to fly this time around, and it’s time to get the Flyers back on tract through actions, not just empty words. The ball’s in your court, Briere. Figure it out.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: sjmagazine.net
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