Thankfully, the Flyers' season is over. This has been painful to watch. The last few years have also been hard to see, but this one was particularly rough. It saw the departure of fan-favorite Scott Laughton. The Flyers also traded Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee, two young players the team was allegedly trying to build a future around. To cap it all off, the Flyers dismissed head coach John Tortorella with nine games left in the season.
So what happened? How did this season end this way? How did a season that began with some promise fall apart? Well, there are several reasons, but it isn't that hard to figure out.
The Goalie Situation
I'm not going to beat this one into the ground as it has been well documented all year. While Sam Ersson has done what he could this year, he took a step back. Maybe he isn't ready to be a starter, maybe he is best suited to be a reliable backup, maybe the defense left him out to dry too much, or maybe this team has played him too much and wrecked his confidence.
The other two, Alexsei Kolosov and Ivan Fedotov, have been disastrous in the net. Changes need to be made if this team wants to move forward. Whether that comes via trade or free agency is yet to be determined. Perhaps Daniel Briere may have to cough up some draft picks for a goalie who wants out of a bad situation somewhere else. If he can find a good one, I'm all for it. No matter what, this team cannot and will not see the playoffs until they can sort out their problems in the net.
Player Regression and Stagnation
Some players had career years this year. Tyson Foerster and Bobby Brink set career highs in goals, while Travis Konecny set a new high in points. That's great. Unfortunately, that wasn't the norm.
One of the reasons that Frost and Farabee are gone is that they didn't seem to improve. They weren't bad players, but they never got better. They were ok being just ok. Similarly, you saw Cam York not improving his game much. Owen Tippett saw a reduced point total as well as a drop in goals after two solid years.
For a team that is hoping to build around young players, you need those players to step forward and continue to grow and develop. For the most part, that didn't happen. Is it that the players aren't as good as we thought they were, or is there something else?
The Tortorella Factor
It could be that the something else was the recently departed head coach. His benchings of players at some point wore them down. Many times it didn't make sense to us as fans and it didn't make a lot of sense to the players either. York, for one, expressed displeasure at being treated like this.
While it is the coach's right and prerogative to do this to shake things up, you risk losing the locker room. At some point during this season, the team seemed to give up on Tortorella. You can see evidence of this by the fact that in their last nine games, the team went 5-3-1 and went on a scoring splurge.
Did Tortorella hold back this team's offensive abilities with his insistence on defensive play? Was he blinded by his "system" that he ended up coughing this team some much-needed victories? Who's to say?
We'll probably never know everything that went on behind closed doors. At the same time, it's hard not to see that this team seemed to play a whole lot better after his dismissal.
False Expectations
This last one is on us. We thought that this team, which almost made the playoffs last season, was in a position to do the same this year. After all, they were in contention for a playoff spot almost all of last year until a post-deadline collapse. Surely they could get there this year, right?
Despite both Tortorella and Briere warning us that they were not ready to take that next step forward, many of us got our hopes up. We thought that the addition of Michkov might be the key to getting back to the playoffs. We almost made it last year, so we have to be good this year, right? Turns out, the answer was a resounding "No!"
With many of the issues that we've already mentioned, it's the high expectations that we had hoped for that is most tragic. We set this team up for failure. And when they didn't meet expectations, we were disappointed. Again, we were warned by the team management that we aren't there yet and the rebuild isn't close to being over. We didn't listen. We didn't want to listen.