Bad Gambles Define Flyers Management

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The Flyers have toiled over the last decade, in what may be the most confused and muddled time in their history. Since the Summer of 2012 the Flyers have had nine head coaches, four playoff appearances and three general managers, soon to be four given what we just witnessed over this year’s NHL draft.

I do not think Chuck Fletcher is a good general manager, I never have. It is true that he has been the master mind behind a series of catastrophes that will set the team back half a decade at the least, but I can’t dump all the blame at his feet. He had been tasked with the equivalent of making a submarine fly. It was just was not going to work out, not for Fletcher, not for the Flyers, not for anyone.

Much the same way it takes time to bake a cake, it takes time the to build a good hockey franchise. It can’t be rushed. But heck, if someone was willing to pay me, who wouldn’t give it a try. I still get paid if the cake is raw or if sub drops from the sky like, well, a submarine.

In 2018, the season before the upheaval of the Hakstol and Hextall ejections, the Flyers had finished with 98 points with Brian Elliot, Michael Neuvirth and Petr Mrazek in goal. Jori Lehtera, Valterri Filppula, Dale Weise and Matt Read up front. The defense featured Ghost, AMAC, Hagg, Gudas. That group amassed 98 points, a number we will not see anytime soon. But more than that, we had Carter Hart waiting in the wings, cap space that had not been seen in years, a surplus of draft picks and one of the deepest prospect pipelines in the NHL.

Contrast this with today, we are over the cap, the prospect cupboard is bare, the team does not have a second round draft pick until 2025. In four short years dynastic optimism has been transformed into a doomsday clock until a complete tear down. Observing the Flyers over the last four seasons has been something like watching a slow-motion house fire as prospects, draft picks, cap space, hopes and dreams are incinerated in plain view. It is tough to watch and I snapped during the draft.

After spending the better part of two seasons trying to find a RHD to compliment Ivan Provorov, passing on David Jiricek is very hard to accept or understand. Cutter Gautier may turn out to be a fine player. I hope he does, and I wish nothing but the greatest success for the kid, it is not his fault the Comcast team drafted him. It was a head scratcher. At this point I wonder if Fletcher and company did not know Jiricek was right-handed.

If one was lucky enough to make peace with that pick, to see the Flyers part with three draft picks for a Tony DeAngelo would destroy whatever rational that satisfied you. There is so much wrong with the DeAngelo trade, and I say this as a fan of his game that I can’t find a rational way to justfy the Flyers actions. This is another example of WTF management decision which we have now become accustom.

Tony DeAngelo and Vincent Trocheck, Carolina Hurricanes (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images) /

I get that with DeAngeleo there is baggage. That is a deal breaker for some. I can respect that opinion. Anyone can make a mistake, and it is not my job to see that he is forgiven or not. But it is my purview to show that the Flyers are engaging leadership you would expect to see from sheep passed down from the Comcast, and it is to the organization’s detriment.

For what it was worth I advocated signing DeAngelo for 2 years at 1.25 million last summer. The risk being, that some of the bad behaviors came back, with the calculation that in such an event the team could put him in the minors for two seasons, which would only cost about $500,000 against the cap and effectively end DeAngelo’s NHL career. It was a slam dunk easy play for a team desperate for a RHD.

Instead DeAngelo signed with Carolina for one year for $1,000,000 in 2021. No draft picks or compensation. Comcast, following the next big thing, wokeness in this case, passed on DeAngelo. Clutching their pearls, making certain to tell those who mattered that they were too good of people to consider a troglodyte like DeAngelo. The Flyers made no offer and had no interest in a player who grew up dreaming of playing for the Flyers.

So what changed in a year? Could it be that virtue signaling and tearing down Kate Smith statues wasn’t filling the seats like they expected? Maybe the “Wife of Gritty” costumes and bobble heads are still stuck in port in Long Beach. Perhaps winning is back in fashion at the dawn of what is to be a pretty rough recession.

But wait it gets worse. DeAngelo is inked a pretty rich extension with the Flyers, maybe close to “take this job and shove it” money. While I don’t expect Tony D to back slide, it seems more likely he could with a fat guaranteed contract, rather than while fighting for an NHL future.

He is the same guy who had the same questionable past as he did a year ago. How has the risk changed on DeAngelo? At the least, it is the same. But rather than taking a low risk chance, as the Canes did, the Flyers paid through the nose for a player who was no less risky than he was a year ago. The calculus does not make sense, it is like paying $10.00 for a bag of sketchy day-old soft pretzels you could have gotten for $2.00. No matter the price, the pretzels are still sketchy, purchasing them is taking the risk, but why pay more for it? That is bad management.

Rasmus Ristolainen, Philadelphia Flyers and Steven Lorentz, Carolina Hurricanes (Mandatory Credit: James Guillory-USA TODAY Sports) /

Another example was the Ristolainen trade. Rather than ship out Ghost for less than nothing, literally we gave up two picks to part with him, and trade a king’s ransom for Risto as the brain trust did. The Flyers could have waited a year for Ristolainen to be a UFA and for Ghost to improve his trade value. What did the team have to lose by waiting a year for Risto to become a UFA? Was another year of Ghost (who led Coyote blueliners in points) on the back end really going to make the difference? The Flyers would have only gotten 58 points instead of 61.

Did the Flyers front office think that the Sabres, and Ristolainen for that matter, were finally going to put it together for a cup run that would make signing Risto impossible? The reasoning here is hard to figure.

I wish I could give a detailed answer to what the Flyers are doing, but I have not gotten an explanation. All I have is pure conjecture based on what we have seen. The Flyers went all in, with a bad hand, and lost. Now, with their time running out, the Flyers brain trust will not retrench, but gamble away today, and every asset they have for the next three seasons, hoping they find the magic mix.

This is not the moves of someone carefully constructing a vision, but of the degenerate gambler who has lost all but the last $100 of his mortgage payment at the casino, and has no choice but to keep playing and hope his number comes up on the roulette wheel.

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