Flyers Quarter Season Grades
Flyers Quarter Season Grades
With their 4-1 win over the Buffalo Sabres, the Flyers have officially eclipsed one-fourth of the season, so now is the perfect time to review the Flyers’ quarter season grades.
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Front Office
With chants of ‘Fire Holmgren’ raining down in the Wells Fargo Center only 11 games ago, it’s hard to ladle heaps of praise on general manager Paul Holmgren. Between an ongoing inability to manage salaries in a world of a hard cap, firing a coach only three games into the season, the puzzling acquisition of Mark Streit on a team in desperate need of solid defensive players, and a spastic series of buyouts and movements on franchise players, the argument that the Flyers had not improved much over the last few years is unavoidable. However, Vincent Lecavalier has proved to be an invaluable asset and seems destined to produce his best goal output in five years.
The Steve Mason/Ray Emery experiment has worked. The Steve Downie trade is paying dividends; even if he still skates like a tank, his puck control, passing, and fearlessness have given the Flyers possibly the best third line in the league. Each loss makes Holmgren seem close to the guillotine and each win pulls him further away, there’s a long way to go before the a more definitive picture emerges; if the Flyers secure a playoff spot with ten or more games remaining, he stays. If they miss the playoffs, he’s gone. Anything in between depends on how deep they go in the postseason.
Grade: C
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Coaching
Peter Laviolette was dismissed before he had a chance to do anything with the team, and it’s impossible to know if he could have righted the ship on his own. Craig Berube could hardly be faulted for the losses that followed; despite his eight year tenure as a member of the coaching staff, the implementation of his system occurred when the team had zero confidence. However difficult it is to use only a handful of games as a sample set, the Flyers are apparently buying into his system; the team has accumulated points in the last six games, scoring more than three goals in four of those outings, and they never truly looked shaken.
The Flyers’ forecheck occasionally looks eerily similar to Laviolette’s style, but when it comes time for defense, the team has been better at locking the game down without sacrificing offense; their goal differential in the third period of those games is 9-4. Part of that comes from a level of confidence the team has been lacking for almost two years, but part of it is also rock-solid coaching.
Grade: B
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Offense
Talk about a tale of two teams. In the first fifteen games, the Flyers scored 23 goals, only slightly better than a 1.5 per game. In the last six, they’ve scored 22, producing at a clip well over 3.5 per game. Better yet, the scoring has been balanced such that every line’s gotten into the action. Claude Giroux still has yet to truly bust out, but his puck control and decision making is greatly improved. Though Brayden Schenn has been the subject of trade rumors, he’s currently tied for the team lead in points while playing hard-nosed Flyers hockey.
Sean Couturier, Matt Read, and Steve Downie are starting to look like the best third line in the sport, combining Read’s all-around skill, Couturier’s smarts and defense, and Downie’s passing, pesting, and hard work. Jakub Voracek just had a five-game point streak broken, and though Scott Hartnell still leaves something to be desired, it’s nice to know that the Flyers have an abundance of weapons, all of whom are dangerous on any given night. On the other hand, their confidence rests on a razor’s edge and a few more games are required to know that they’ve truly overcome the worst start in franchise history.
Grade: C-
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Defense
Unsurprisingly, the defense has been a mixed bag. Featuring the longest list of potential blue-liners on the Flyers in almost a decade, it was going to be a crapshoot for awhile. Kimmo Timonen has looked his age most of the season, ramping up his backchecking penalties and nullifying the lion’s share of Flyers’ powerplays, but with only one minor penalty in his last nine, he seems to have settled in. Mark Streit hasn’t acquitted himself as an able defensive stalwart and looks to end up with his lowest PPG (0.33) since his rookie year, a shortfall that would label any offensive defenseman a bust. Andrej Meszaros seems to have played himself right off the roster with his timid play, bad passing, poor coverage, and 18 penalty minutes in nine games; if the Flyers had an amnesty buyout left, you’d better believe Meszaros would be shown the door.
On the other hand, Luke Schenn was scratched early, but since the Flyers’ 0-7 defeat at the hands of the Capitals, he’s been a +4 in six games while piling up 26 hits and 6 blocked shots. Eric Gustafsson is looking smarter and faster in each game. Brayden Coburn and Nicklas Grossmann are the rockstars, however, combining for 19 hits, 25 blocked shots, 3 assists, and a +11 in the last six games alone. In a collective sense, the defense seems tougher, more comfortable, and more assured, not leaving the goalie hanging out to dry like they did with Ilya Bryzgalov. It’s hard to argue with results like that.
Grade: B
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Goaltending
In a word, wow. The dueling goaltenders aesthetic seemed like little more than an interesting experiment at first gasp, but Emery and Mason have played lights-out all season. Where Emery struggled behind a shell-shocked team in some early outings (recovering after beating a reluctant Braden Holtby to a pulp), Steve Mason is looking more and more like a Vezina trophy candidate each game. Part of that is thanks to the tightened defense, but he’s covered enough lapses to maintain him for sainthood. Better yet, the two goalies seem to enjoy a solid rapport.
It goes without saying that none of credit for this goes to goaltending coach Jeff Reese, who has statistically done little to improve the play of any goaltender for whom he’s been responsible. This year’s system was supposed to be a competition between two good goalies to see who could take the reins, and Mason is the man between the pipes. Though an uncertain future awaits with his contract negotiations, and most Flyers goalies seem to have stellar freshman campaign before falling apart their sophomore year, the blue paint has been the area of least concern for this season.
Grade: A+
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Special Teams
The Flyers PP conversion currently stands at 14.1% while their PK is at 81.8%. Nothing to write home about, particularly when last season they were the best overall special teams group in the league with a third-ranked powerplay of 21.6% and a fifth-ranked penalty kill of 85.9%. The PK is hard to diagnose since the team is inexorably a man short and the opposition is supposed to score on a powerplay, but overall the Flyers seem to have some difficulty just clearing the puck and a strange predilection for leaving players uncovered in the crease. The powerplay is a different story; perhaps endemic of their overall struggles, the unit makes one to two passes two many, which, if you ask the hometown crowd, is already three or four more than they should.
The lingering desire to hang on to the puck and view options from a stationary position allows the opposing penalty kill to arrange their players in an ideal setup, and conventional wisdom says outworking the PK and getting them out of position earns the best opportunities. Also, the Flyers have a few setups that are just way too predictable; Giroux is going to be on the left-side half-wall where he will look to dish to the right winger at the circle or the point, or take the shot himself. He’s been successful there, so other teams know what he’s going to do. The two-pass/shot system, where Giroux generally deals it from his office for a Lecavalier one-timer at the opposing face-off circle, is already being anticipated by the opposing goaltender. There’s a lot of work to be done.
Grade: D+
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Superlatives
Worst Player: Andrej Meszaros.
Most Improved: Brayden Schenn.
Most Regressed: Kimmo Timonen.
Best Acquisition: Vincent Lecavalier.
Worst Acquisition: Mark Streit.
Unsung Hero: Adam Hall. Since I’ve mentioned all the others in previous sections, I thought it was worth giving a shout-out to the team’s real underdog. In addition to energizing the penalty kill and displaying some unreal abilities at controlling the puck in the offensive zone, Hall is a face-off god. He’s currently third in the league among players who have taken at least 100 draws and is an incredible, unbelievable, synonym-defying 82% in his last six games. For a scale comparison, Patrice Bergeron was the best in the league last season, and on 884 face-offs, he was 62.1%.
Flyers Quarter Season Grades: Overall
As the Flyers’ quarter season grades for each section will attest, it’s been a trying 21 games, but when it seemed as though the Flyers turned a corner against Pittsburgh, they backed up the assessment with strong, consistent play. It’s a long road ahead and various streaks, trades, and injuries will conspire to help and hurt the team at various points, but it’s impossible to deny a sense of optimism rooted not in blind faith, but assured results.
