The 2023-24 Philadelphia Flyers season has come to an end after making it to a meaningful game 82. A late-season losing streak removed them from a playoff spot they held onto for a vast majority of the season and there just wasn’t enough time to right the ship.
Looking back in the campaign, it tells a tale of a team that far exceeded expectations, and not just because the organization spent the summer preaching about a rebuild, but because the players themselves were playing well above their own ceilings for much of the year.
So what went wrong for the 2023-24 Flyers?
Well to start, the offense is just miserable. They finished 27th in the league in total goals scored with just 2.82 GF/PG. They only had three players hit the 50-point plateau and their highest scorer didn’t even break 70 points. They did somehow manage to have four 20-goal scorers though (Konecny, Tippett, Farabee, Foerster). It’s the first time they did that since 2019-20 and the four’s combined 103 tallies accounted for 44% of the team’s total goals this season.
The general offensive back hole was most obvious on the powerplay, where the Flyers finished dead last for a third consecutive year at just a 12.2% success rate. By percentage, it’s the worst they’ve finished of the three seasons.
The goaltending was where things unraveled the hardest. Through the first half of the season, the tandem of Carter Hart and Sam Ersson was among the best in the league. Then, Hart left the team to surrender to the police for his actions tied to the ongoing 2018 Team Canada investigation and Ersson was on his own. His play was wildly inconsistent and, along with Cal Petersen and Felix Sandstrom, the trio posted the worst save percentage in the NHL dating back to January 20, just three days after Hart’s last game with the team.
Tortorella mentioned in one of his pressers that the team was expecting Carter Hart to go away and that he had penciled Ersson in for 18-22 starts when the season began. Hart played a vast majority of the games for the first few months of the season before December rolled around and a much more even split took place before Hart’s departure in mid-January.
Now, 18-22 starts for Ersson seems like a fairly low projection even if Hart made it through the season, given the latter’s career high is only 55 games played. But the intent was seemingly there from the organization to work Ersson in to the league rather than throw him directly into the deep end and it’s not necessarily their fault for the way things went down.
Fast forward to April and Sam Ersson suited up for 51 games during the 2023-24 season and is sporting a 2.82 goals against average and .890 save percentage. He did bounce back during the last few games and gave them a chance to claw back into the race, but it was too little too late.
Losing Hart was a massive death blow to the team, but the reality is, if there’s only one guy on the roster whose capable of winning games for the team and they’re doomed without him, it’s probably a rather flawed roster to begin with.
When the trade deadline came around, the seemingly playoff bound rebuilding Flyers had a decision to make about some of their assets. While they didn’t sell much, they did ditch Sean Walker. Then to “reward” the team for their efforts, they brought in 36-year-old veteran Erik Johnson. It was a massive downgrade and partnered with the injuries that popped up on the blue line around the same time, it took out the one position of strength the Flyers were relying on.
Yeah, they got a first round pick for Walker (actually, they had to eat the contract of Ryan Johansen to do it, but don’t let details get in the way of a good story) but the fact that they countered that by bringing in another body in an attempt to maintain their playoff spot is a peak behind the curtain that the team was trying to keep too many irons in the fire at once, and walking the fine line between competition and rebuilding is not an easy thing to do.
It may sound gloomy, but a late season collapse that caused them to miss the playoffs was probably the best possible thing for this team. They can’t kid themselves that they’re capable of hiding their flaws anymore. Action has to be taken for progress. Resting on their laurels is a risk they just can’t afford. They can’t just pat themselves on the back for overachieving and run it back with a roster primarily untouched.
Generally speaking, the season can be looked upon as a success. They defied the odds for months and brought eyes back to the product after years of chasing away the fans. There were some positives and blocks worth building around, but the questionable negatives that were palpable (and generally ignored by both the team and fans) were just too much to overcome. The team needs an injection of star power throughout the lineup, and until they get it, they’ll be stuck on the bubble. It’ll now be up to Danny Briere to navigate through a very interesting offseason to find reinforcements so they avoid falling into the same pitfalls the organization has done in the past.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: Getty Images
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