I have a neighbor who has been a Flyers season ticket holder for more than 10 years now.

After a free agency period in which the team missed out on Johnny Gaudreau and instead signed Justin Braun and Nic Deslauriers, he texted me the following:

“Dude I can’t believe the Flyguys are totally fucking this up. I might have to jump off the Ben Franklin.”

Exaggeration? Obviously he’s not diving head-first off a bridge, I think… but fans seem ready to abandon ship because Chuck Fletcher’s offseason has consisted of trading for a guy who had to reiterate he’s not a racist, then signing a 35-year-old 3rd pair defenseman they traded last season at the deadline and a 4th line goon, who got a four-year contract. They used the 5th overall draft pick on a guy who obviously is not going to contribute right away, and then signed a bunch of fringe dudes as well.

No big splash. They didn’t attach assets to move JVR’s contract (despite pissing away picks for two $5 million AAV defensemen), which would have given them the cap space to sign Gaudreau, and even if you didn’t agree with that move, at least it would have shown ambition and fit the “aggressive retool” strategy we were told about. Signing Braun, Tony DeAngelo, Deslauriers, and keeping Risto around is more about Chuck Fletcher trying to save his job and stay afloat.


It really doesn’t add up, when you think about bringing in John Tortorella to coach a team that looks like this:

  • Sean Couturier (coming off injury)
  • Ryan Ellis (injured, might not even play)
  • Joel Farabee (just underwent surgery)
  • Carter Hart (needs D in front of him)
  • Ivan Provorov (didn’t have a great year)
  • Kevin Hayes (didn’t play a full season)
  • JVR (led team in goals, but overpaid on final year of contract)
  • Bobby Brink (injured)
  • Travis Konecny
  • Braun
  • DeAngelo
  • Deslauriers
  • Zack MacEwen
  • Scott Laughton
  • Morgan Frost
  • Ronnie Attard
  • Travis Sanheim
  • Cam Atkinson
  • Cam York
  • Owen Tippett
  • etc

Then you add in the Oskar Lindblom buyout. That was probably the right move, but another loss in the optics department since the guy recovered from cancer only recently. Kudos to the Flyers for making that $100,000 donation, which is really all you can do to help blunt the sting of a necessary business decision that no doubt looks bad from a sentimentality perspective and even worse when the thought was that it would free up space for a Johnny Hockey pursuit.

Fletcher said the Flyers are done with big free agency moves, and in a Wednesday press conference, offered this about keeping fans in the building:

Last year, you guys struggled to keep fans in the building and attendance numbers were down across the board. What would your elevator pitch be to the fan base going into the season, to get them back? How do you pitch them on this is a team that they need to come out and see?

Well, we’re a team that we feel we’ve become a lot harder to play against with some of the moves we’ve made today. We’ve made strides to shore up our defense core, which last year with injuries in particular, struggled. We think we have players that we can slot in their proper spot this year with the players that we’ve added now. We have an opportunity to give a lot of our young players a chance to see what they can do. We believe Couturier and Hayes have a chance to be healthy and get back to being productive players in the National Hockey League. Joel Farabee had off-season surgery, but we believe he’ll be able to play pretty early in the season. We believe we still have good depth of scoring up front. We have three lines that we believe potentially, assuming they’re all healthy, can produce and provide depth to scoring. We like our defense core and we have a goaltender in Carter Hart, who took a step forward last year. We believe he’s just entering the prime of his career. We have a lot of good pieces. We need to stabilize, as I mentioned earlier. We believe John Tortorella is going to help bring a harder to play against mentality for our group, is going to improve our defensive structure and cut down on our goals against. Frankly, it starts with that. That’s why we made the moves we did to improve our defense core. With the coaching staff, it’s going to be paramount to reduce our goals against dramatically and improve our penalty kills. We believe that we have enough skill upfront to score goals.

Yeah, I dunno. This team just isn’t that good. Even if everyone is completely healthy there’s not enough talent to begin with. There’s no superstar. Other teams have their Nathan MacKinnons, Connor McDavids, Jonathan Huberdeaus, etc. Those guys don’t grow on trees, but there are enough to go around that the Philadelphia Flyers, with a fan base that actually gives a shit, should have at least one dude whose jersey is worth buying. I mean Johnny Gaudreau went to Columbus, for Christ’s sake, when it was reported that he had interest coming home. Florida had THREE guys who put up more than 80 points last year and Nashville had three guys in the top-25. The Flyers had two things in the top 50: jack and shit.

This is a .500 team AT BEST. They aren’t better than the Canes, Rangers, Penguins, Caps, Islanders, Blue Jackets, and maybe even the Devils, who went out and got Ondrej Palat and can’t be any worse. I just named the entire Metropolitan.