The 2023-24 Philadelphia Flyers’ season is almost in the books, and it’s been a wild ride from just about every angle. There were highs, there were lows and there was a whole lot of in between. Their eight-game losing streak (and counting) just about killed their playoff chances after holding an 80% to make it just a few weeks ago.
The team entered the season with the pledge of a rebuild, then spent most of the season doing things counterintuitive to what a typical rebuilding club would do. And their desire to walk a near prefect line between a competitive playoff team and an asset-hoarding rebuilding team has clouded the waters a bit when it comes to what their intentions moving forward actually are.
Taking it all in, however, there has been one question that has been asked, and that’s whether or not the 2023-24 season can be considered a success for the Flyers?
The answer is… well… it depends.
There were some individual highlights. Travis Konecny had another strong season. The defense on the whole was much better than expected, despite a rather underwhelming lineup on paper thanks in large part to assistant coach Brad Shaw. While the production from most of the “pillars” of the team were disappointing in the grand scheme of things, none of the younger main roster pieces regressed either, which is about as much as you can ask given the anemic state of the offense.
But the prospect integration was a bumpy ride, especially when the team was supposed to be under the guise of a rebuild. Outside of Tyson Foerster, none of the rookie skaters saw sustained lineup time which can be tied back to John Tortorella’s lack of patience, his one-way “accountability” a.k.a punishment and his preference of relying on the 40-year-olds laced throughout the roster which was highlighted in Brink versus Atkinson and later Attard and Ginning versus Staal and Johnson.
But the reality is that the 2023-24 season never really mattered. It was originally anticipated to be a down year with targeted drafting in 2024, but even with the relatively successful run that (probably) won’t amount into a postseason berth, it doesn’t really mean much. Sure, it was a brief feel good moment in what has been a years long black cloud, but one improved season does not a good team make.
It’s all about how the organization responds during the summer. The Flyers have had these one-hit-wonder seasons before, notably in 2017-18 and again in 2019-20 where they’d overachieve then do absolutely nothing to build upon the success during the offseason and they’d fall back to Earth the following season. A situation the need to look to avoid repeating yet again during the 2024 offseason.
The simple truth is that a late-season collapse that causes them to miss the playoffs may actually be the best thing for this team. They proved that there is a skeleton here worth building around, but they left absolutely no space for the front office to rest on its laurels. They need to make changes this summer. Big changes. Something that felt significantly less likely had they trotted into the postseason as underdogs.
The tailspin has left fans a bit weary because they’ve seen this movie before, but on the whole, there’s still quite a bit of faith in the front office. They better not take that for granted and run the team back in near-entirety only for the same failures to occur again. Danny Briere doesn’t need to build a Cup contender in one summer, but he needs to make a few high profile deals that address specific areas of weakness like the powerplay and overall lack of high-end talent, especially up front.
So was the season a success? In a lot of ways it was, but it has also left quite a bit to be desired. Can the front office make the necessary changes to prevent this kind of disaster again? That’s the big question moving forward. The problem is nearly the entire roster is already under contract for *at least* 2024-25 which leaves them little room for natural opportunity for change. Trades are going to have to dominate the summer if there’s any hope for a different product next season.
Hopefully everyone can look back at the 2023-24 season as the starting point of the new era of orange, but the last season struggles sure feel similar to the previous ones. The ball is now in Danny Briere’s court to make the necessary moves to prove things are different this time, and it’s no easy task to right the ship known as the Philadelphia Flyers.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: nhl.com
brotherlypuck.com 