Blame Chuck Fletcher all you want, but the Flyers’ problems predate his arrival

One of the more amusing aspects of the Flyers’ descent from excellence to mediocrity to sub-mediocrity over the last 18 years has been the public anger directed toward Chuck Fletcher, who became the club’s general manager in 2018.

It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s a contagious case of long-term memory loss going around. I’m not suggesting that Fletcher should have been earning any votes for NHL Executive of the Year during his tenure. But I am suggesting that, when it comes to assigning blame for the Flyers’ fall and understanding how it happened, Fletcher is an immediate and easy target. Consider two factors that can be and are often overlooked:

One: Fletcher works for people. He works for Dave Scott and the rest of Comcast Spectacor. And when those people hired him, they gave him a mandate to complete the most difficult of tasks in a sports league with a salary cap: to turn things around quickly.

Yes, the Flyers should have picked a strategy and stuck to it. Yes, they should have either leveled with their fans that a long and painful rebuild was ahead (the sounder, more realistic strategy) or sacrificed whatever prospects and draft picks were necessary to try to win a Stanley Cup right away. Yes, their approach instead has been muddled and inconsistent. But if you want to target those who ultimately are responsible for such an approach, you should aim higher than Fletcher.

Two: The notion that the Flyers’ decline is a recent development — that everything was going fine until Ed Snider died and Ron Hextall and Fletcher came along and the franchise lost its identity — is inaccurate. It’s worse than inaccurate, actually. It’s laughable. The first sign that the Flyers were headed for trouble, and that they’d struggle to pull themselves out of it, came in 2006, 10 years before Snider’s death, eight years before Hextall became GM, and 12 years before Fletcher arrived.

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Let’s do some stage-setting first. In 2004, the Flyers lost in seven games, to John Tortorella and the Tampa Bay Lightning, in the Eastern Conference finals. That club was the consummate manifestation of the Flyers’ pre-salary cap methods. It was veteran-laden, loaded with experienced players whom the organization had recently acquired in the hope of making a playoff push. The Flyers could afford to do that then, when all they needed to spend money or make a major trade was Snider’s approval.

Then the NHL lockout of 2004-05 happened. The implementation of a salary cap loomed. To their credit, Bob Clarke — the Flyers’ GM at the time — and his assistant, Barry Hanrahan, reached out to then-Eagles president Joe Banner for insight into how to negotiate a cap. To their discredit, the Flyers either never understood or declined to follow Banner’s advice. Eight games into the 2006-07 season, the Flyers were 1-6-1. On a Sunday morning in late October that year, they announced that coach Ken Hitchcock had been fired and that Clarke had resigned as general manager.

Immediately after the announcement, Clarke told reporters: “I felt strongly that from the end of last season on — I don’t know if I was burned out or tired or something — but the decisions that had to be made, I was not willing to make them.” Six weeks later, once he had returned to the organization in a scouting and consulting role, he explained the reasons for his decision in more depth to the Daily News.

“The business of sports when you’re a GM is becoming bigger and bigger,” he said. “Personally, I like hockey way more than I like the business and the complications of the business. For me, I came here when hockey was the biggest part of it all, and a GM now is as much a business guy as he is a hockey person.

“I still had the enjoyment of the game, but I lost the enjoyment of what I was doing. It’s been a couple of months now. The fun of watching the game and stuff is still there for me. Talking hockey with hockey people, that fun is still there for me.”

Clarke’s successor, Paul Holmgren, took on the challenge of constructing a roster each season while under the confines of a salary cap, and he made enough big, bold moves to get the Flyers to the conference finals in 2008 and the Stanley Cup Final in 2010. But he was only slightly more inclined to balance the present against the future — the dance that any cap-era executive must dance — than Clarke was.

The Flyers still went all-in all the time until Hextall took over, and it has been off-putting to witness the bitterness that Clarke, others in and around the organization, and many Flyers fans still bear toward Hextall over his actions as GM. He made his mistakes and missed on his draft picks — especially Nolan Patrick in 2017, as Clarke pointed out during a podcast interview in January — but those errors wouldn’t distinguish him from Clarke, Holmgren, Fletcher, or just about any NHL GM.

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No, Hextall’s greater sins seemed to be that he cut himself off from the franchise’s old guard, from the people who had hollowed out the Flyers in the first place — that he was willing to take his time, demand some patience, and withstand the unavoidable unpleasantness that comes with rebuilding a team. Better that than where the Flyers are now. Better that than where this nosedive really began, with Clarke’s reasons for walking away once the going got tougher. It was too hard, and it wasn’t fun. Whenever the Flyers get around to burying this era of their history once and for all, if they ever do, they ought to carve those words into the headstone.