The Gritty Meter: We came up with a metric to quantify the Flyers’ blue-collar identity

Nick Seeler walks into the Zack Hill Media Center.

At 6-foot-3, 197 pounds, with a quiet demeanor and a smile as wide as his home state of Minnesota, he doesn’t necessarily strike fear into the heart of anyone. But when he adds 22 pounds of hockey gear and laces up his skates, he is someone you do not want to mess with.

Seeler is one of the grittiest players who has donned the Flyers’ orange and black.

“I have heard that before, yeah,” the blueliner said with a grin when asked about his gritty style of play. “I have heard that. I think it’s something that I’ve always had when I play. It’s something that I need to bring, is grittiness and toughness. I think with our group, we have a whole locker room of guys that have the willingness to play gritty, and that’s the game we have to play.”

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But how does one accurately measure something less concrete like grittiness?

We set out to do it, and tried several metrics that could potentially account for grittiness. Ultimately, we settled on five that are tracked well by the NHL: hits, blocked shots, penalty minutes, major penalties, and game misconducts. The goal was simply to measure grit — not determine if it’s good or bad, necessarily.

Stats were measured on a per-game basis. We ranked every team for each season on these metrics using data from the NHL going back to 2005-06, when the league’s modern statistical era began. Separately, we used data from the hockey data hub Natural Stat Trick to rank every player in the NHL who had played at least 20 games in the 2023-24 season by March 20 (sorry Matt Rempe) on the same metrics.

Those rankings were used to calculate an equally weighted score of the five metrics, which was then used to create an overall ranking of players and teams, the “Gritty Meter.” Here are the results:

Out of 688 qualified NHL players, Seeler — a guy Flyers coach John Tortorella called “a nut job” earlier this season for his willingness to put his body in harm’s way — ranks No. 2 on our Gritty Meter. The top-ranked player in our metric was also a defenseman who has worn the Flyers colors, Anaheim’s Radko Gudas.

“I think gritty is a mindset. I think it’s something that the Flyers today have to play with to be successful. I think this year [you] have seen it quite a bit, that when we’re successful, we’re gritty,” Seeler said.

Up until his ankle injury in early March, the defenseman led the NHL in blocked shots (184); despite missing the last 10 games, he’s still tied for second with the Dallas Stars’ Chris Tanev. In 63 games this season, Seeler has thrown 112 hits and ranks eighth among blueliners with 78 penalty minutes — including four five-minute majors and one 10-minute misconduct. During the last game before the Christmas break, Seeler received more penalty minutes (27) than he played (8:24) in the Flyers’ 6-5 overtime loss to the Detroit Red Wings.

“He’s as intense a player as I’ve seen and I just love him,” Tortorella said in February.

“He’s got that Flyer identity in him,” center Sean Couturier added.

It’s a big reason why the team-first, shot-blocking ace recently earned a hefty pay raise. On March 6, Seeler, 30, was handed a four-year, $10.8 million extension by the Flyers.

“It’s something that I have to do. I think it’s part of my job to play gritty,” Seeler said. “So, I would take that as, certainly, a compliment if they said that you play gritty because that just means I’m playing as I should be playing.”

Seeler thinks that the Flyers’ success, their grittiness, is also about buying into what Tortorella has preached since he arrived last season.

“As I’ve said, we’re trying to build a team here to identify with the city and the city to identify with us,” Tortorella said recently when asked to describe Flyers hockey. “That’s hard work. That’s determination. That’s no-nonsense, willingness, all those contribute to being the right pro.”

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In each of Tortorella’s two seasons at the helm, the Flyers have ranked No. 2 in grittiness among NHL teams. It makes sense to the eye and represents a sweeping change from the Alain Vigneault era that saw the Flyers dip into the 20s during his two full seasons with the team. Philly has consistently been in the top five since 2006-07, finishing first from 2007-10 (under John Stevens and Peter Laviolette) and again in 2015-16 in Dave Hakstol’s first year.

“It’s a common cliché, that work will beat talent unless talent works. It’s also the simplest way to make that point. If you work hard, you can outperform more talented guys and that bodes well in hockey,” said Todd Fedoruk, the Flyers’ radio analyst and a former gritty Flyer himself. “And I think, if you look at the Philadelphia Flyers this year, they exemplify that level of grit that can make everybody else question what’s going on because it’s not a skill set. It’s something that’s learned, it’s something that’s picked up and then the skill becomes the willingness to continuously do it on a consistent basis, so that it becomes part of your makeup.

“The Flyers have always been that in hockey. And I think that’s the one element that’s really back here. And it bodes well because of the fans. The fans came back and they came back because they have seen that. The outcomes are great, yeah, but they’re working and they play with a level of grit, and determination that’s attractive.”

As a team, through Tuesday’s games, the Flyers ranked first in shots blocked (1,402), sixth in penalty minutes (771), seventh in hits (1,826), ninth in majors (23), and tied for sixth in misconducts (11). For clarity on how good the Flyers are when it comes to eating shots, the team in second, the Vegas Golden Knights, have 1,345 — 57 fewer blocked shots in one less game.

As Fedoruk said, “Grit is the callus of hard work,” and the Flyers players’ bodies are filled with them — and, yes, black and blues and broken bones (see Noah Cates’ broken foot) — from blocking shots.

“It’s such a broad, broad word,” Tortorella said when asked to define grittiness. “It’s a mindset. It’s wall play. It’s taking a hit to make a play. It’s caring about your teammate. It’s such a general term. We could talk about it all day long.”

“I’d say never giving up really, hard to play against. Just kind of in the battle whenever there’s a battle. Gritty,” added winger Garnet Hathaway, who checks in at No. 14 overall on our Gritty Meter.

“It’s just the way our locker room is, it’s the way our group is, it’s the way we have to play,” Seeler said. “At the end of the day, it’s everyone buying into what Torts has preached since he’s gotten here. And the guys rally around the grittiness that we bring.”

Playing a gritty style has worked to this point, as the Flyers, who were picked to finish near the bottom of the league standings, are in playoff position with just nine games to go. While the Flyers might lack a bona fide star or a ton of high-end skill, their rugged and selfless style of play has helped them punch above their weight and compete with the NHL’s elite.

This season’s Flyers are a throwback to the old days. They remind fans, and the hockey world, about “Flyers Hockey,” a unique mixture of skill and toughness that was made famous by the Broad Street Bullies of the 1970s. It’s a style of play that not only can be seen on highlight reels from the days of Bobby Clarke and Ed Van Impe but has been carried on through the years of the Rick Tocchets, John LeClairs, and today, Seeler and Hathaway.

“[It’s] the whole legacy of the Flyers organization really,” said Hathaway, who took it as a compliment when he was called gritty by this reporter and teammate Travis Konecny. “The players that came before us. I think the standard that was set in terms of effort, in terms of compete level, and playing with that passion, that comes from the fans. It has been in our organization’s history since we started.”

Although hits weren’t tracked before 1997-98 and blocked shots until the 2005-06 season, penalty minutes have long been an earmark in determining which teams are the roughest and toughest. For 11 straight seasons, between 1971-72 and 1981-82, the Flyers led the NHL in penalty minutes — by a long shot. In the 1972-73 and 1973-74 seasons, the Flyers racked up around 600 penalty minutes more than their closest competition. The following year there was a 700-minute gap. Dave Schultz, aka “The Hammer” and an original Bully, still holds the NHL record for most penalty minutes in a season (472 in 1974-75).

“I think, the Broad Street Bullies, they played a really, really tough game. I think the game has definitely changed since then. So I think the grittiness is a little bit, I think it’s different nowadays,” Seeler said. “But it’s certainly something that you still need to bring as a Flyer — because, honestly, I think the city is just gritty. I think it’s people that care about people and they care about their sports and their team’s success and we kind of all rally around each other.”

Gritty is a blue-collar mentality. Being gritty is Flyers hockey. It is Philadelphia. It’s why the mascot is named, well, Gritty.

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