Photo Credit: Zack Hill
There is no denying that this is a huge off-season for the Flyers. After missing the playoffs one year after finishing one game from the Eastern Conference Finals, Chuck Fletcher’s left searching to make shift his roster trying to build it into a contender, or making the Flyers relevant again.
With the expansion draft looming, most teams throughout the NHL are protective of their rosters, and it’s creating an aura of stagnantation (Not many trades) according to Fletcher:
“It seems like more teams would prefer to wait until after Seattle makes their decisions. But there is a lot of dialogue. Teams are, I think, trying to get a read of the room right now and see who’s available, what other teams are trying to do and what options we all may have once we get closer to the draft and free agency. So a lot of chatter. From our standpoint, we certainly aren’t going to be making a trade today or tomorrow, unless something unexpected breaks right now.”– Chuck Fletcher
The Flyers will make moves, and it might very well include the 13th pick. To Flyers fans demise, Fletcher has preached patience of staying the course with the youth, and to refrain from including them in trades if necessary. He specifically stated that they “We have to find a way to make them better,” and “Are better than how they performed last year.”
“It’s hard to say for sure what caused some of our young players not to play at the same level,” Chuck Fletcher said. “The pandemic would be one logical reason. Maybe expectations for some of them coming off a strong year and just assuming you’d be able to come back and do the same thing. I do think it’s certainly is a reason to give pause. Some of our young players, at least in my opinion, are better than how they performed last year. I think you need to be a little bit careful overreacting to one year, particularly in one year, as crazy as last year was. We know they have to be better and we have to be better. I think we just want to be a little bit careful here. We’ve worked hard as an organization for the last seven, eight years to patiently add and draft and develop a lot of young players. It’s kind of been the focus of the franchise, going back to 2014 probably. You got to be a little bit careful that you don’t change course and start moving by good young players that maybe struggled for a little bit last year. We have to find a way to make them better. We have to get better and we’ll work very hard at that. We’ll probably get into this later on in the summer, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time this summer looking at our staff, our structure. I think we’ve made some really meaningful changes and improvements to how we do things, not just from a coaching standpoint, but from a development standpoint, a scouting standpoint, and a data standpoint. We put a lot of time and effort this summer and fixing some things off the ice that we think will lead to better on ice results. We’ve looked at everything. Last year was unacceptable. It’s been a busy offseason behind the scenes and I’m really happy with some of the moves we made. Now we have to find a way to get better on the ice and that’ll be the focus from here on out.”
There will be many moves this year that much is for certain. One interesting note from yesterday’s press conference is; Fletcher alluded to a shakeup of some sort with the front office. Now everyone knew that there would be some assistants hired with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, and a person to fill in Ian Laperrière’s old spot. However, there could be more changes, and Fletcher vowed to inform everyone shortly thereafter:
“Yeah, we’ve made a lot of personnel moves that we’ll announce in short order. We’ve spent two months doing this stuff, so we will have a lot of changes to announce here in the new in the near future. We’ve worked pretty hard to that. I think we’re in pretty good position going forward.”– Chuck Fletcher
Goaltending will be a priority, and we have been discussing this for sometime. Fletcher said that the “Goaltending has to be better.” This is as much as a priority as the blue line. Whatever happens between now and the draft is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear that Fletcher has his hands full this offseason with making this team a contender again.
“I think there’s been a lot of focus on the blue line. To me, the number one priority is our goals-against. It was just ridiculous how many goals we gave up last year. That goes back to everything. It goes back to the coaches having a great training camp and using the practice time early in the season to reinforce our systems and our structure. It’s our goaltenders playing better. It’s our defenseman playing better. It’s our forwards managing the puck better. We’re going to need to look at upgrades to our roster. There’s no question. We’re also going to need the players that are returning to play better, in particular, without the puck and structurally. We’re going to need our coaches to get our players back in that structure and reinforce the system. It’s not just one thing that led us to fall from seventh in the league defensively to the bottom of the pile. You have no chance, no chance to win in this league unless you’re at least in the top half of the league defensively. We have a lot of work to do. Again, we have holes we need to fill and we have players that are currently on our roster that need to play much better. It’s got to be a holistic approach. It’s not just one player that’s going to turn it around. It’s everybody, starting with me that has to be much better this year and that has been conveyed to everybody in the organization.”
Lastly, it appears the protection list is complete from the Flyers:
“First of all, I think we have our Expansion Draft list put together. If we make moves between now and then, we can adjust it obviously, but we have a pretty good idea of what we want to do and who we’re going to protect and who will make available. For this Expansion Draft, we had more time than we did versus the Vegas draft. More time to make sure we had all the holes filled and we met all the criteria that we needed to meet. From that standpoint, it’s been a little simpler. The pandemic and the flat cap have made it probably more difficult because obviously, there’s cap pressures on teams. So Seattle will certainly have an opportunity there to talk to teams about helping them out with their cap issues in exchange for various assets. We’ll see how that plays out. Seattle, I’m sure, will have good options. They’ve worked hard, but I think we had a little bit more time to plan for this one. We feel like we’re in good shape.”
