Firing Chuck Fletcher gives the Flyers a shot at a fresh start. They had better take it.
With Fletcher gone, it is time for the Flyers to finally embrace the rebuild and start to right the wrongs committed by the organization over the past decade-plus.
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Firing Chuck Fletcher ends nothing for the Flyers. It begins everything, or should. It is the first, necessary step on a journey with an uncertain destination. The Flyers don’t know yet where they’re going to end up. No one knows. They might win a Stanley Cup someday. They might stretch their 48-year championship drought to 55 years, 60, 65, three-quarters of a century, or more.
What they do know — what they finally seem to understand, based on a statement released Friday by Comcast Spectacor chairman and team governor Dave Scott — is that the journey will be long. It has to be long, and it has to be long because the Flyers’ journey toward the bottom of the NHL has taken nearly 20 years itself.
» READ MORE: Flyers fire embattled general manager Chuck Fletcher after four-plus seasons
“We know that this will be a multiyear process,” Scott said, “and we are committed to doing it right because we want to put this franchise on a path toward winning the Stanley Cup, period.”
That acknowledgment, that use of the phrase multiyear process, was no accident. The Flyers aren’t going to fix what’s broken in their franchise just by replacing Fletcher as their president of hockey operations and general manager, just as firing Ron Hextall in 2018 and hiring Fletcher to replace him didn’t fix anything, just as grooming Hextall and handing things over to him in 2014 didn’t fix anything, just as Bob Clarke washing his hands of the job in 2006 and shoving the responsibilities to Paul Holmgren didn’t fix anything.
Fletcher’s inaction at this year’s trade deadline was the most recent flashpoint for anger at his expense. More than anything, though, his inability to make a significant move — particularly his failure to trade James van Riemsdyk, a pending unrestricted free agent — was a symbol of the Flyers’ sure and steady regression and lack of forward-thinking over the last decade-plus.
Don’t misunderstand: It was an embarrassing symbol. The fact that Fletcher didn’t deal van Riemsdyk for even a bag of pucks and a decent skate sharpener was a damning indictment of both his negotiating skills and the investments that the Flyers had made in particular players. Any GM can trade a van Riemsdyk or a Kevin Hayes and get appropriate value in return. Not every GM can get value for a van Riemsdyk who is earning $7 million this season or for a Hayes who is scheduled to earn $7.14 million annually through 2026. Fletcher wasn’t such a GM.
But then, that has been one of the Flyers’ primary problems throughout the salary-cap era. They don’t plan ahead. They don’t think ahead. They don’t lay groundwork. They rarely get creative. They too often base their potential success on the rosiest possible scenario playing out. They haven’t been realistic in evaluating and judging themselves.
Instead of trying to “compete” this season on the hope that Sean Couturier and Ryan Ellis would be healthy and that John Tortorella would extract the best from this overmatched roster, Fletcher and the Flyers should have been trying, from the instant training camp began, to trade van Riemsdyk, Hayes, and another veteran or two.
If the Flyers had been serious about signing Johnny Gaudreau last summer, they wouldn’t have had to attempt so many last-minute measures to clear cap space. They would have targeted Salem County’s Gaudreau two or three years ahead of his free agency, made sure they had positioned themselves to afford him, and pursued him. You think John Middleton, Matt Klentak, and the rest of the Phillies’ decision-makers were sitting around a boardroom one day in February 2019, kicking around ideas, until someone said, Hey, you know what we should do? We should sign Bryce Harper! Hell, no.
» READ MORE: A timeline of the Chuck Fletcher Era in Philly
The Flyers have to start thinking that way. They should have been thinking that way already, and if Danny Brière — for now the interim GM and perhaps the new man in charge for the long term — wants to take the organization in a new and better direction, he’ll start not by worrying about the 2023-24 season but rather the 2026-27 season. And ‘27-28. And ‘28-29. And those seasons will be defined, to a large degree, by this offseason, by this year’s draft, by the talent that the Flyers can gather and grow. It has been their greatest failure over the past two decades, their inability — either through bad luck, bad decisions, or bad processes — to find, acquire, and develop highly skilled, young players. They’ll never get anywhere if their new GM and new president can’t fulfill those essential tasks.
It’s to Brière’s advantage that he and Tortorella get along well, because, despite Tortorella’s tendency to push certain players to their breaking points, once he lands with a franchise — outside of one ill-fated season in Vancouver — he tends to stay there for a spell: seven seasons in Tampa, four-plus seasons with the Rangers, six seasons in Columbus. It didn’t take him much time to see the Flyers as the mess they were and are, and he has established himself as the organization’s face and voice. As much as anyone, he has been pushing the Flyers, through his public and private words, to do what for so long they refused to do.
The Flyers have needed a reboot. They have needed a fresh start. This is their chance to give themselves one. They had better take it.