Flyers GM Chuck Fletcher has had a rough year. Can he redeem himself before the trade deadline? | Sam Carchidi

The Flyers’ defense hasn’t just been bad lately. It has been historically bad.

And it’s been a team effort because their goaltenders, defensemen, and back-checking forwards have all been guilty parties.

No one has any solutions.

“If I could,” coach Alain Vigneault said after Saturday’s 6-1 beatdown by the Islanders, “I would have fixed it already.”

The overall team defense has been weak all season, but it has become unwatchable lately. The Flyers have dropped to 30th in the 31-team NHL in goals allowed per game --3.55 -- which is nearly a goal more than at a corresponding point last season.

Over the last three games, the turnover-plagued Flyers have allowed 18 goals, including the worst shutout road loss -- 9-0 to the Rangers -- in franchise history. Over the last six games, they have allowed 32 goals.

That’s their highest six-game total since Nov. 13-24 in 1993, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

That was a team that was heavy on offense – Mark Recchi (107 points), Eric Lindros (97), and Rod Brind’Amour (97) and Mikael Renberg (38 goals) had big seasons — but had a weak defense and got poor goaltending from Dominic Roussel and Tommy Soderstrom.

This year’s team started 8-3-2, but has dropped dramatically since six regulars were placed on the COVID-19 list and their season was paused. Since then, the Flyers are 7-8-1 and in danger of falling out of the playoff race unless they rebound quickly.

General manager Chuck Fletcher, whose inability to find a reliable replacement for the retired Matt Niskanen is at the root of the Great Defense Dilemma, is now faced with a difficult question: Does he become a buyer or seller before the April 12 trade deadline?

In a Twitter poll conducted after Saturday’s 6-1 loss, 70% of the 3,740 responders said the Flyers should be sellers.

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“This team,” wrote one person who wanted the Flyers to be sellers, “has as much energy and enthusiasm as a packed morgue.”

“Don’t get why we would sell,” wrote another fan. “We’re literally three points out.”

The Flyers are three points behind Boston, which has a game in hand, for the fourth and final East Division playoff spot.

Will adding a quality defenseman be enough to get the Flyers into the postseason?

If not, it wouldn’t be worth going after a player the caliber of Nashville’s Mattias Ekholm, which would probably cost them a No. 1 draft pick and two quality prospects, and would complicate their expansion-draft protection plans.

If they acquired a player who isn’t as costly as Ekholm – say, Columbus’ David Savard, who is right-handed, plays tons of minutes, does lots of grunt work, and would complement Ivan Provorov on the top pairing – that would make more sense.

Complicating matters, however, is that Columbus has climbed into the playoff hunt, and it may decide to keep Savard, an unrestricted free agent after the season who had his foot out the door.

If you can get the 6-2, 233-pound Savard for a second-rounder, it would be worth the risk. It would give the Flyers someone who would stabilize the defense (and Provorov) and give them a much better chance to reach the playoffs, where anything can happen.

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The defense has been ugly. Miscues. Blown coverage. Poor zone exits. And every time they make a mistake, it seems to end in the Flyers’ net because goaltenders Carter Hart (3.83 GAA, .875 save percentage) and Brian Elliott (2.97, .892) have turned into, well, Roussel and Soderstrom.

So it’s fair for Fletcher to wonder if adding just one defenseman will make enough of a difference.

His other option is to become a seller. Maybe he tries to deal someone like left winger James van Riemsdyk – he is having a career season and might be the missing piece for some contender – and bring back a valuable draft pick or two.

The next seven games – the Flyers face the Islanders in the front and back end of that span, along with the Devils, Rangers (twice) and Sabres (twice) – should make the picture come into focus for Fletcher. By then, he should know if the team that came within one win of reaching the conference finals last year is worthy of a playoff run or a fire sale.

After that stretch, they play Boston, a team they are chasing, three times in four games, so a trade would be advisable before those meetings.

Fletcher has had a bad year. In a head-shaking move, he signed Erik Gustafsson – an offensive-minded defenseman with limited defensive skills – after Niskanen retired. It seemed like a bad fit at the time and that hasn’t changed.

Fletcher needed to get a veteran who was more about defending, like Niskanen, and complemented Provorov.

Without Niskanen, Provorov’s game has dipped considerably, and it hasn’t helped that he has had a rotating line of partners and hasn’t been able to develop chemistry with them.

Fletcher also gambled by not adding a veteran forward in case either Nolan Patrick or Oskar Lindblom were slow to make recoveries from devastating and well-documented medical issues.

He had someone right in front of him, Tyler Pitlick, a 6-2, 200-pound winger who would have been a perfect fit. He helped give the Flyers an identity with his ferocious forechecking last year and he played with an edge, something this smallish team needs. Pitlick led the Flyers in hits last season and topped the forwards in blocked shots.

Pitlick signed a two-year free-agent deal ($1.75 million annual cap hit) with Arizona in the offseason, and he has more goals (6) than Jake Voracek (5).

There were other forwards with similar pedigrees available that Fletcher could have signed cheaply as an insurance policy instead of counting heavily on Patrick and Lindblom both returning to form. Some might say Fletcher had Morgan Frost, who has since been injured and is likely out for the season, waiting in the wings. But Frost had yet to prove himself.

Now, with the Flyers having lost six of their last nine games, Fletcher has a chance to save face from his offseason miscalculations by either making a shrewd deal, as a buyer, to ignite a playoff drive, or by becoming a seller and at least pointing the Flyers in the right direction for the future.