Rick Tocchet has been in the NHL long enough to know your coaching style has to adapt to the players on your roster, and not the other way around. While Tocchet has seen teams play different styles during his time on the staff of six different organizations, and most recently, Team Canada at the 4 Nations Face-Off and the Olympics, he is going all-in on possession-based play with the Philadelphia Flyers this season.
"Puck possession, that's the thing I keep telling my team. If we have the puck a lot more, you defend less. "Rick Tocchet
Tocchet's ideas for Philadelphia make sense, given that their projected six defensemen have an offensive flair, most notably with Travis Sanheim, Cam York, Jamie Drysdale, and David Jiricek. In the meantime, Nick Seeler and Rasmus Ristolainen aren't quite as offensively inclined, but every team needs a couple of big trees on the backend.
An age-old adage in hockey and sports in general is that the best defense is a good offense. If your team controls the puck more than other teams in the league, your defense and goaltenders get fewer taxing minutes and, more importantly, your team gets more chances to score. If you see a team on their heels for large stretches in the defensive zone, they are more often than not an unsuccessful team.
Flyers' puck possession metrics were poor in 2025-26
Tocchet and his staff clearly dug into the numbers this past offseason and identified an area where the team has to get better. 50% is the baseline for Shot Attempt Percentage, whereas anything below that number means your team or player spends more time defending and giving up shot attempts than generating them.
In 2025-26, just five Flyers players had a percentage equal to or above 50%, with three of those players, Porter Martone (9 games), Egor Zamula (13), and Jacob Gaucher (4), having too small a sample size for it to matter. The other two players were Sean Couturier (50%) and Matvei Michkov (50.2%).
Tocchet would like to see most of his roster get much closer to the 50% baseline, with more regulars getting above that 50% mark. It's a testament to the Flyers' last season that they made the playoffs and advanced to the second round with numbers like this, and a clear sign that an improvement in the area could take them to even greater heights.
The downside of that is Tocchet wouldn't want to test fate for a second straight season. While Philadelphia persevered through some shoddy advanced numbers last season, expecting them to do it twice in a row might be a tall order, especially with the uncertainty surrounding Dan Vladar's injury status, as he was a big reason they overcame it in 2025-26. Luckily, it doesn't seem this particular injury will linger through the start of the season.
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