Flyers Blueprint For a Rebuild

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.