Flyers Blueprint For a Rebuild
The Chuck Fletcher era has ended in Philly. His tenure effectively killed the meticulous Hextall five year rebuild. In its place Fletcher provided 4 years of what seemed like desperation, Hail Mary, roster management. It is safe to say that Fletcher has left the Flyers in ruin for barely a sniff of winning hockey.
The team is now laden with bad long term contracts and is readying for a needed multi-year rebuild. The Gostisbehere and Ristolainen trades were the Fletcher equivalent of Cortez burning his ships when he came to the new world. The Flyers went all in, do or die, and came up short. In fact they were not even close. Worse still, they were not even compelling, unless you are into self-inflicted social justice controversies.
Fletcher was a bad hire, but it was management’s insistence that the Flyers were ready to be contenders that destroyed the team. Dave Scott made this happen, Fletcher was merely the blunt instrument of self destruction. Dave Scott’s lack of vision, understanding and patience is what doomed the team. Fletcher was asked to make a roster that was not ready, and not yet deep or talented enough to contend, into a cup threat.
I guess Fletcher figured it was better to agree with Scott’s outlook, collect a check, and make some really bad gambles rather than pass on the job. Fletcher would get paid no matter the outcome, and if it broke bad, it would be someone else’s problem. It sounds like standard bad management practice of large corporations or government.
Danny Briere, who will serve as General Manager, finds himself cash strapped and with little help coming from the prospect pipeline. I remain skeptical of Briere’s ability as a general manager. In truth I am being unfair, letting the bias I held against him as a player leak into an entirely different position. Briere may turn out to be a fine GM, but he is not the man for this job at this moment.
This is not some curb appeal, slap some paint on, renovation, this is not even tearing down to the studs. The Flyers need to be bull-dozed and rebuilt from the ground up. This can’t be a band aid half hearted turn around. The Flyers need a complete shift in ethos, which will require pushing back against the Comcastic management team in order to build for long term success. The roster management alone is a big ask from a first time NHL GM, but to push back hard against the management who hired him is too much.
The one piece of stable foundation left is coach John Tortorella, who has done an admiral job coaching a team that has had 20 million in player salary injured for most of the season, and another 7 million dollars in cap space consumed by JVR. That is a third of the team’s cap space, that is not productive. Tortorella is getting good milage from the players he has, kept the team focused, even with corporate creating needless controversy.
If I am being honest, this may not be what Torts signed up for, and I would not blame him if he asked for his release, but Torts is not that kind of guy. The more likely scenario is that the roster changes brought on by a rebuild will make him implode as the losses mount. Coach Tortorella would be a fine choice to bring a team out of a rebuild, but is just not wired for the early portion of this kind of process. For him to accept losing is against all of his being as a coach. While I appreciate what the coach has shown this season, I just don’t think his nature and the situation will mix well. I look for the coach to be jettisoned once the roster is fully depleted.
Whoever steps in as the General Manager to rebuild needs to start with getting upper management in line. Someone needs to tell Dave Scott and the Comcastic brain trust to stay out of hockey. The Fletcher disaster was of his engineering, when he drummed out Hextall for being too patient. If it is not obvious that Hextall was right, it is undeniable that the Scott antidote was bad medicine, making the situation far worse. By all accounts Scott should also be fired, but Comcast cares so little about the Flyers that is unlikely.
The new GM needs to tell Scott, or his corporate overlords, that this rebuild cannot be rushed, because this is not a rebuild, this is the team entering a new business. The point of the front office hence forth should be to amass talented players with favorable contracts. The Flyers have tried for years to dress the 20 “right” guys each night by cherry picking players via trade or free agency.
The only thing that the team has proven is the Flyers are really bad at this approach. The Flyers now need to commit to loading their deck with good players through trades and signings that can create value. It is a strategy that takes full advantage of the best pool of talented players with good contracts, the draft.
Once Comcast management has been stifled sufficiently, the process of rebuilding will begin. The approach is simple, but unpleasant, and will require commitment. Fletcher has effectively boxed the team in with currently untradable contracts like Sanheim, Ristolainen and Couturier. There are other contracts that can be moved like Hayes and Farabee, but the years on the contract will discount the return on any trade. But in order to rebuild quickly the Flyers must create cap space, perhaps as much as 35 million. Because of the Scott/Fletcher plan the Flyers would be better off hiring an accountant as the GM rather than a former player for this phase the rebirth.
The Flyers need to offload the dead wood. By my count, there are at least three, and perhaps as many as five, contracts that would qualify. There is a market for such contracts. Teams that are facing financial difficulty need dead wood. It allows a team to stay above the leagues cap minimum but at a substantial discount. Using Ryan Ellis as an example, he is $6 million in salary cap dead wood that make signing or extending anyone difficult for the Flyers, but for a team like the Coyotes, who struggle to stay above the league minimum, he is found money.
While the Coyotes would see Ellis and his 6 million dollar cap hit, the team, the owner would only pay him a fraction of that because he is injured. Insurance on the contract would reimburse the owner, potentially to 75% of the contract. In the Ellis example that is 4.5 million dollars going back to ownership, which would go a long way in paying other staff.
After moving as much of the obstacle contracts as possible, the team then needs to look at making the tough decision on good players who are marketable. DeAngelo, Provorov, Konecny, Tippett and Hart should all be shopped. These are good players with favorable deals that will provide the core of assets that will be used to rebuild the team, but starting from the ground up the Flyers will have wasted their prime years. The Flyers should trade them as they approach their peak for maximum return.
The Flyers should concentrate on grabbing draft pick. Picks take no cap space nor do they count against team’s 50 contract limit. Picks are going to be the life blood of the team. It should try to amass 10 picks in the top 100 for each of the next three years. That means the team gets a 1st, 2nd or 3rd pick when it trades, and accepts nothing lower. Hopefully the Flyers will address their scouting and development issues, and get better, but the increased volume of picks should translate into more prospects.
Once the team has hocked every asset it can, the team should use all its new found cap space to become the island of misfit contracts. Call it expert trade facilitation. The Flyers will need to be shrewd, either taking short term liabilities, or risks on useful players with slightly longer terms that will expire at strategic points in the future. The price for this service would be paid in top 100 draft picks,
In the offseason, the Flyers should look for value free agent signings, reclamation projects or veterans willing to sign one year deals. Carolina took DeAngelo one a one year deal, and turned him into a 2nd, 3rd and 4h round pick. That is a perfect example of a value signing, high upside, little down side. While DeAngelo may have been an extreme case, there is value that can be unlocked in each free agent cycle.
A complete tear down would leave the team short on talent for several years, but that is not much different than this season. Seasons would be sacrificed for establishing a solid foundation and for forward looking assets, rather than running on a treadmill and getting nowhere. I would expect the process to show meaningful on ice improvement by year five, as the second and third round prospects start to fill in the lineup. By year seven, the team should be playing from a position of strength, with a well-managed salary cap with most of the roster on first or second contracts. In addition a pipeline of prospects that should be challenging the incumbents. Seven years seems a lot to ask, and it is, but it is better than another four years of what we have just experienced.