Now that the prayers and hopes and dreams of Flyers fans everywhere have been met with the dismissal of Chuck Fletcher as general manager, we now hope that there will be a time when our team will not longer be afterthoughts or laughingstocks. It will take years of aggressive, and possibly painful, maneuvering to fix what is wrong with this team. It will be years before this team is in the playoffs and truly competitive.
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at the Fletcher Era of Flyers history. It was short (blessedly), from December of 2018 to March of 2023. To be fair, there were some moves he made that were good. There were others that were awful. There are still more that we don’t know enough yet how they will turn out.
Before we begin, there are lots and lots and lots of deals that general managers of teams do. Many of them are inconsequential. There were a lot of trades that were just draft picks, minor leaguers, or fourth line bench players that really didn’t matter a lot. Likewise, there are a lot of free agent signings that are just re-signing rookies, undrafted prospects, contract extensions, or signing picks.
We are not going to examine every single move that he made. For example, nobody is clamoring for any opinion on 2019’s Jordan Weal to Arizona for a sixth round draft pick in 2019 and Jacob Graves. However, we will look at some of the bigger deals that have happened.