Alain Vigneault was not the Flyers’ problem. Their issues go much deeper | Mike Sielski

That the Flyers were going to fire Alain Vigneault sometime soon was always a fait accompli. It is what they do. Ed Snider, Dave Scott, Chuck Fletcher, Paul Holmgren. Vigneault, Dave Hakstol, Peter Laviolette. Six head coaches in eight years. The names of the coaches and the decision-makers change. But the decisions rarely do.

So here we go again. The Flyers had lost eight straight games ahead of their matchup Monday night against the Colorado Avalanche, and whether Vigneault was the primary issue with this particular team in this particular season isn’t really the point. Firing the head coach is the path of least resistance in the NHL, and the Flyers resist it less than most franchises. But whether Mike Yeo, Vigneault’s interim, remains behind the bench for the rest of the season or Scott and Fletcher hire a less-temporary replacement — Rick Tocchet? John Tortorella? — this franchise will have gotten no closer to solving the core problem that has bedeviled it for the better part of two decades.

Put simply, the Flyers don’t have enough good players, and they haven’t for a long, long time, and it will take an even longer stretch of time for them to gather enough to be an elite team again. The notion that the Flyers were “underachieving” this season under Vigneault gets the framing exactly wrong. Given their draft history since 2003, they are achieving. They are exactly the team they ought to be based on the amount and quality of talent they have found, developed, and retained.

» READ MORE: Flyers fire head coach Alain Vigneault amid eight-game losing streak; Mike Yeo named interim coach

That 2003 draft is a significant marker for the organization. In that first round, the Flyers drafted Jeff Carter and Mike Richards, and the significance of their selections isn’t just that those two were supposed to be the team’s centerpieces and, for a variety of on- and off-ice reasons, were not for a prolonged period (each played just six seasons with the team). It’s that, by trading the two of them in 2011, the Flyers acquired Jake Voracek, Wayne Simmonds, Brayden Schenn, and a first-round selection that they turned into Sean Couturier. They were able to keep themselves treading water for a while thereafter. They could ostensibly keep competing for a Stanley Cup. But the truth was that the organization already was hollow, an empty bucket, and it has done little in the years since to refill itself.

From 2004 through 2012, the Flyers drafted five players, just five, who made any sustained and substantive contributions for them. In ‘04, they picked 11 players who have appeared in a combined 23 NHL games. In ‘09, they drafted six players who appeared in 47 NHL games. In ‘10, the six players they drafted ended up suiting up in 36 total games in orange-and-black.

Those five draftees who did stick were James van Riemsdyk, Claude Giroux, Couturier, Shayne Gostisbehere, and Scott Laughton, and their contributions were not as substantive as they might or should have been. Van Riemsdyk was the No. 2 pick in the 2007 draft, for instance, but three years into his career, the Flyers traded him to Toronto for Luke Schenn. During his five seasons with the Maple Leafs, van Riemsdyk averaged 31 goals over an 82-game season, which is exactly the sort of production one would hope for from a second overall draft pick … except the Flyers enjoyed none of those spoils (he averaged 16 goals in his first three years with them), because they had traded him for a fifth defenseman.

Giroux and Couturier have been excellent, of course, though the former has less frequently been the dominant player, the rising tide who lifts the boats around him, that his most enthusiastic defenders claim him to be. Laughton, meanwhile, was a first-round pick, too, but he has been little more than a solid third- or fourth-line forward.

» READ MORE: Flyers drop eighth straight with ‘embarrassing’ 7-1 loss to Tampa Bay Lightning

The last 10 years have been better, but only marginally. The Flyers’ most successful draft picks — Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, Carter Hart — have shown glimpses of greatness but have been inconsistent. Travis Sanheim and Robert Hägg … OK. Oskar Lindblom and Sam Morin were victims of terrible luck and fortune. The organization is still waiting on Morgan Frost. German Rubtsov, the Flyers’ first-round selection in 2016, has played just four games for them. The team was fortunate to get the No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 draft. It was a chance to grab a superstar. Nolan Patrick, instead, was a bust, a missed opportunity. The three players who went directly after Patrick that year? Miro Heiskanen, Cale Makar, and Elias Pettersson, all of whom have been All-Stars by this point. Of the 26 players the Flyers selected over the last four drafts, 2018 through 2021, just two have appeared in a game for them. One is Joel Farabee. The other is Cam York, who has appeared in three.

There’s no way to minimize how damaging this trend has been. Without a deep enough talent pool, any team in any sport becomes top-heavy, relying on the acquisition of already-established players to keep itself competitive. In turn, it has to overpay for such players or engage in short-term hole-plugging. This season’s Flyers are a perfect example: Keith Yandle, Derick Brassard, Rasmus Ristolainen, Ryan Ellis, Cam Atkinson, Patrick Brown.

The single exception over this last decade-and-a-half of wheel-spinning was Ron Hextall. No, Hextall was not a perfect general manager. Far from it. The Flyers made several of those failed draft selections and decisions on his watch. He made trades and signings that were questionable at best. But Hextall recognized that a rebuild would take years — not one year of big trades and signings, not a couple of summers of astute moves, a half-decade at least, likely more — and there were no shortcuts.

Hextall’s bosses, unwilling and too impatient to let him follow through fully on his plan, fired him in 2018. They tried to speed up a process that can’t be sped up. It is infinitely easier to miss on a draft pick than it is to make a smart one, and since the Flyers have been missing on picks for so long, their chances for a fast rebuild are remote at best. Yeo, Tocchet, Tortorella: Not one of them is the answer. Not one of them is fixing this.

“The group cares about each other,” Fletcher said Monday. “There’s good chemistry. This isn’t a case where the room has fallen apart. There are no fractures in there. There were a lot of positive signs I knew we had to build. Before this eight-game streak, we were in a playoff spot. We weren’t playing perfectly, but we were a decent team, a decent team that needed to get better. Now we’ve just completely lost our way.”

In other words, they’re just not good enough. Get used to it, if you haven’t by now.