The Flyers’ power play was ‘Tortured’ all season long, just ask Taylor Swift
The parallels between the track titles and lyrics of Swift's latest album and the Flyers' woes on the power play are uncanny.
Taylor Swift dropped her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, in the early hours of Friday morning. Sure, you may think it’s about her relationships but, let’s be real here: It’s really about her hometown Flyers and their power play.
First off, the power play was bad. Like, can-they-decline-the-power-play-akin-to-the-Eagles-declining-a-penalty bad. The Flyers finished at 12.2% — more than three percentage points worse than last year’s 15.6%. They scored a league-worst 31 goals in 254 opportunities, which was, by the way, the ninth most chances in the NHL. Averaging that out time-wise per game, it was 5 minutes, 21 seconds, the sixth most in the league.
Woof.
To make matters even worse, it is the Flyers’ worst percentage in team history. Worse than the previous mark of 12.6% set in 2021-22 (the league started tracking the statistic in 1977). And, unofficially, based on box-score research, below the franchise’s first year of existence, at 12.3%.
Double woof.
“I can fix him, no, really, I can,” Swift sings on the track with the same name. Is it about Matt Healy or is it Rocky Thompson talking about the power play? Hard to gauge.
Thompson, the Flyers associate coach who has been in charge of the man advantage the past two seasons, threw everything at the wall. Speaking to the media for the first time all season in March, he said, “Well, our power play stinks.”
Woah.
He mentioned the quiet elephant in the room out loud — to a question about adding newly acquired forward Denis Gurianov to one of the five-man units.
“It’s actually pretty impressive what we did all year with our power play the way it was and not scoring goals,” Scott Laughton said on Wednesday less than 24 hours after the Flyers’ season ended. “I think your power play wins you games during the year and it didn’t win us many games this year.”
As Swift posted in a teaser, for her new album back in February: “I love you. You’re ruining my life.” Did the Flyers power play do that? Did it keep the Flyers from making the postseason? Maybe? ... Probably? Of the 11 teams below the 20% mark, the only one not in the playoffs is the Winnipeg Jets at 18.8% and, well, they have Connor Hellebuyck between the pipes.
“Being on the power play, it’s been really frustrating the last two years,” said Joel Farabee, who took some of the blame for its ineffectiveness as one of the Flyers’ main power-play personnel.
“I think the really good teams in the league can steal games, just power play alone,” Farabee said. “It’s definitely something that we focus on. We try to get better, and we try to improve. I think the guys in the room, we talk about it all the time. It’s just trying to get better, trying to get more chances. Obviously, it’s not easy.”
Farabee and Travis Konecny noted the summer months will be spent with some of the focus on the man advantage. And it should be. As Swift sings on the track “How Did It End?” — “We hereby conduct this post-mortem.”
Now, before things get too deep, coach John Tortorella said on Friday in his last official chat of the 2023-24 season: “Organizationally, we have to sit down and talk about [the power play] and Rocky Thompson is going to for sure be in that conversation.”
So, before you think Thompson is gone, think again. He’ll be part of the tortured poets for a little longer.
The one positive for the Flyers is that the organization is chock full of power-play guys. It is time for guys like John LeClair (118 of his 406 career goals were on the power play), Patrick Sharp (74 of 287), Dany Heatly (298 career power-play points), Bobby Clarke (333 power-play points), and Bill Barber (280 out of his 883 career points) to get involved. Heck, even Flyers president Keith Jones has spent some time on the man advantage.
» READ MORE: 5 key questions facing the Flyers as they begin an interesting offseason
But Rome wasn’t built in a day, as Flyers general manager Danny Brière noted. He should know. More than a third of Brière’s career points came on the power play.
“I’m not saying that we’re going to go from 12.2% and double that and get to 25%. We have to be realistic here,” he said. “It’s going to be small steps. A little bit like when we attacked defending better the last two seasons, didn’t happen overnight. Our [penalty kill] was something that we focused on. This season, I think it finished in the top five. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to be a work in progress.”
Some of the positives from the season were the work of guys like Farabee, in the net-front spot, and seeing the creative juices flowing for Morgan Frost, Bobby Brink, and Jamie Drysdale. Egor Zamula’s confidence grew and grew with the man advantage and seeped into his five-on-five play. Tyson Foerster’s lethal shot connected for four out of his 20 goals this season while Owen Tippett led the way with five. It needs to be noted that the NHL’s top guy, Sam Reinhart, had 27, and even the Anaheim Ducks, ranked No. 31, had a guy with 13.
“Honestly, there’s really no excuse on the players’ end,” Drysdale said. “We just have to be better, and that’s kind of it. There’s no one to blame but ourselves. We’re given the information on what to expect and whatnot and, yeah, we just have to be better. There’s no one to really kind of point at than the people on it.”
The Flyers kept rotating the same 10 to 12 guys between the units. Chemistry was hard to find at times and overthinking and going for the fancy play may have played a role. But maybe they should have given Garnet Hathaway and his I’ll-sacrifice-my-body-for-the-team-at-all-costs mentality more time in front of goalies. Maybe Ryan Poehling, who is a puck-possesser and notched a goal and an assist on the man advantage when he got time late in the season, deserved more than his 35 minutes, 41 seconds. Olle Lycksell had 14 goals on the power play across his two seasons with Lehigh Valley — he got less than eight minutes with the man advantage with the big club.
But the story of the power play doesn’t necessarily belong to the players in the organization anymore if you ask Tortorella. He is changing “The Manuscript.”
“I think we have to bring more talent into the organization,” Tortorella said Friday, continuing his season-long thread. “And that’s not blaming the players who were on the power play, but we have to add talent to our team. I think that’ll help those three special teams; the power play, four-on-four, and three-on-three. But it cannot be as bad as it was this year with the people we had.”
That is true. It cannot be as bad ... right? As the bench boss stressed, the one positive is that it’s now a clean slate for everyone.
» READ MORE: Danny Brière’s patience is the best thing the Flyers have going for them in their rebuild
“I know, obviously, a lot of the fans are frustrated with that. We are just as frustrated,” Frost said about the power play. “We were trying our best, trying different things, trying to work hard at it. I think sometimes, maybe, when you force the issue and lose your confidence in it, it’s tough to get it back. I think it’s, obviously, something that needs to be worked on. I take a fair amount of responsibility for that. I played on the power play for almost the whole year.
“I think [we’ve] just got to figure it out, keep working at it, and hopefully once it clicks it can stay for a long time.”
And hopefully, everyone can stop being tortured about it.