By Bob Herpen
Phanatic Hockey Editor
With the induction of Mark Recchi in January of 2024, the Philadelphia Flyers have honored 28 former players, broadcasters and team executives by induction into the franchise’s official honor roll.
A generous gap stretching back to the turn of the millennium dredges up few locks for future celebrations except for Simon Gagne and Claude Giroux, so there’s a wide berth for discussing who else may be worthy.
Who cares.
What about the players who are just as famous, or infamous, for making a distinct lack of impression or the complete and utter wrong impression after arriving in Philadelphia? The ones for whom grit, toughness, glory and desire to play for the crest on the front and not the name on the back in orange and black were as difficult to locate as The Man in the High Castle?
For all of us waiting 50 years or more for the next Stanley Cups, it’s way more engaging to consider the obscure, the ineffectual, the lethargic and the worthless. So here goes.
God Tier
Billy Tibbetts - The tops. The absolute all-time, all-timer. Acquired from the Pittsburgh Penguins on St. Patrick’s Day, 2002 for Kent Manderville and for reasons beyond all parsing by the Western Hemisphere’s greatest thinkers.
Tibbetts arrived here with a rap sheet and a bad reputation, yet we have this classic quote from then-GM Bobby Clarke upon the news: "Billy Tibbetts is a very rugged, physical player. We think that he will play for us and not be an extra, like Kent Manderville was. It is an upgrade on the wings, and Tibbetts can play centre as well. If we run into injuries, he could move well up into the lineup." Before all that, Tibbetts had to take team-mandated anger management classes.
With the benefit of hindsight, many would say Clarke was cooked the second he forgot Claude Giroux’s name at the podium during the 2006 draft. But for those who were there, this is likely the dementia-triggering moment which signaled a long, slow slide.
Head coach Bill Barber managed to find a spot in the lineup nine times for Tibbetts, whose lone point came via a helper on a goal 6 days after the trade in a 4-4 road tie vs. the Pens in Pittsburgh.
A game in which Manderville, predictably, scored.
His final ledger: 9 games, one assist, 69 penalty minutes, thousands of itching heads and sudden-onset migraines both inside and outside Flyers Nation.
Since the early 1970s, the organization prided itself on finding tough guys between the lines who could fit *some* kind of mold demanded of them by a head coach, and the exploits of many who suited up could be described by opposing fans, players and staff as “criminal.”
They went into the stands in Vancouver. And Toronto. Hell, the fans even took on their opponents once or twice. But this was the first time an actual criminal joined their ranks.
More Clarkie: "The problems that he had was over 10 years ago, when he was a teenager. I think that everything's been fine since. It's not anything that we can do anything about, and he'll have to talk to the press about it."
The press, though, happened to be another adversary.
Following a 3-1 win over the Penguins in Philly on Apr. 6, as Tim Panaccio told me via email earlier in the week, Tibbetts said something vaguely threatening to the long-time beat, causing Panotch to pursue him, fully clothed, into the showers. It was none other than Rick Tocchet who pulled him away from a state of impending wretchedness.
Clarke called Panaccio the following day to apologize, and Tibbetts was waived shortly thereafter.
Tibbets somehow managed to dupe the New York Rangers front office into giving him one last shot, for 11 games the following season. Over the next 9 years, Tibbetts embarked on a global tour o’ the rinks, landing in such sexy locales as Hartford, Rockford, Boise, Las Vegas(!), Cape Cod, Switzerland and Finland.
He made the papers in July 2019, with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review citing a report from the Patriot-Ledger out of Quincy, Mass. as saying the 44-year-old allegedly harassed a South Shore police officer and another member of his family.
Nikolay Zherdev - From the ashes of Gagne being the “good soldier” and sacrificing himself to save the club salary cap space in a trade to Tampa Bay, Paul Holmgren took a dip into the shallow end of the free-agent pool and pulled up some lint that looked suspiciously like an NHL-level hockey player.
Zherdev spent the previous season in Russia’s Continental Hockey League, but before that, slogged through 365 appearances over five seasons for Columbus and the New York Rangers. The native of Ukraine notched 23 goals and 58 points over a full 82-game slate for the Blueshirts in 2008-09, but as Hank Hill would say “that boy ain’t right.”
Worst of all, we just couldn’t get rid of him.
Holmgren attempted to trade the unhappy winger for the balance of a month with (not surprisingly) zero success. On Feb. 23, 2011, at the request of his agent Jay Grossman, Zherdev was waived with the intention of giving him an unconditional release from the club along with his $2 million salary. He then exited stage right, infamously, from the Skate Zone premises into a black Lincoln Town Car.
But like the cat who came back in that famous children’s rhyme, Zherdev wasn’t going away so easily. Never mind that nobody wanted him and exile to the American Hockey League wasn’t in the cards. He cleared waivers the next day in spite of interest from Atlanta and Nashville, according to the Inquirer.
With no viable North American options, he eventually sat down with Holmgren and head coach Peter Laviolette for a heart-to-heart. Welcomed back to the team a whopping *three days later* he managed to pick up a goal and two assists in 9 appearances through the end of the regular season, but he sat more often than played. His final ledger: 16 goals, 22 points plus-5 in 56 appearances.
Somehow able to crack the lineup again due to injuries and ineffective play by more trusted sources – although we can forgive Laviolette here for being preoccupied with his goalie carousel – he added 1G & 2A over 8 playoff starts. In early August, Zherdev blew a kiss and said goodbye to North America for good, signing in Russia once more.
Heroes get remembered, legends never die.
Almost Heaven
Petr Nedved - Believe it or not, Nedved’s Flyers connection can be traced back to the late 1980s, when Russ Farwell was GM for the Seattle Thunderbirds of the Western Hockey League of Canadian juniors. Once hired as Clarke’s successor in Philly, as Jay Greenberg recounted in Full Spectrum, it was Farwell’s intention to select Nedved in the first round of the 1990 draft. Instead, despite a trade offer of Scott Mellanby and Terry Carkner to another former Flyer (Pat Quinn) who was Canucks GM, he was plucked by Vancouver at No. 2 with the Flyers picking Mike Ricci two spots later.
Flash forward to 2005, as the NHL began its slow rise from a year’s dormancy.
By now well travelled, Nedved lollgagged through 25 games as a free agent with Wayne Gretzky’s Phoenix Coyotes and Vegas Sideshow before a deal was struck in January to bring the 34-year-old closer to NYC-based model girlfriend Veronika Valekova that shipped Dennis Seidenberg west.
Where he dogged it some more, thanks in some part to an off-season separation with Valekova.
Nedved’s play was so uninspired that Clarke waived him and two others not worth mentioning in the wake of a landmark 9-1 loss in Buffalo on Oct. 17. The Czech winger, who rode shotgun with Pavel Bure and once scored a career-best 99 points with a high-powered Penguins club, wallowed with the Phantoms for 14 games before the Oilers gambled and hit on a second waiver claim just after the new year.
Another one of Clarke’s late-era missteps where he valued veteran help over prospect development.
Money Grabbers and Oxygen Thieves
Adam Oates - OK, so the RPI product centered Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Cam Neely and Peter Bondra. He racked up more than 1,000 assists and almost 1,400 points in a career that spanned three decades.
Two days after Clarkie’s Tibbetts debacle, he liberated Oates from the fading Capitals for Maxime Ouellet and three draft picks, adding veteran depth and acumen in virtually all situations. After posting 11 points in the season’s final 14 games, he was as useless as any of his teammates as they turned in a mind-boggling 2-goal, 5-game, first-round loss to Ottawa.
Bright side – he logged assists on both (by Ruslan Fedotenko and Dan McGillis for the record).
Dark side – the signing became a symbol for the deep abyss major-market teams faced in scooping up stars on the downside of their careers.
What did Oates do the following season? Made it all the way to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals with a veteran-laden Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
Greg Smyth - Supposed to solve the team’s defensive depth issue in the late 1980s, which on its bottom pairs were long on punching (Cochrane, Hospodar, Richter, Stanley) but short on defending, Smyth turned out to be the same old, same old.
Once shaved his hair into a mohawk.
The most memorable thing about Smyth’s one full year here is that he was an unwitting dupe in a prank crafted by then-captain Dave Poulin. As he has recounted on several programs, Poulin counseled the rookie Smyth that all he had to do when crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge, was to yell into the toll baskets that he was a member of the Flyers, and he’d be let through without any fuss.
You can figure out how that went over.
Exchanged with the Nordiques in the 1988 offseason for 5 years of Terry Carkner.
Correction: he also fought Oilers enforcer Kevin McClelland one dismal night in Edmonton and almost went over the top when McClelland zipped a water bottle in his general direction.
Half of R.J. Umberger - Blameless in his first tenure here as he was a salary-cap sacrifice after contributing 10 goals in 17 tilts during the club’s surprise run to the 2008 Eastern Conference Finals.
But not in his second go-round, when the Flyers braintrust saw fit to ship Scott Hartnell straight up to Columbus in June 2014 for Umberger and sign him to a 3-year deal at $4.5M.
Hampered by an injury he intentionally kept secret during his first season back on Broad Street, in his second year he rode the pine about as often as Charlie Brown at lunch time. All told, 11 goals, 26 points over 106 games. It may be one of the more positive notes on Dave Hakstol’s ledger that he was willing to sit the former Ohio State winger.
Force Majeure (for players whose tenure was disrupted or interrupted by forces either within or beyond their control)
Normand Lacombe - Acquired from Edmonton in January of 1990 as one of Clarke’s blockbusters that defined the club’s degeneration during the late stages of his first front-office tenure. Lacombe, by then a Cup winner with the Oilers, spent parts of two ill-fated seasons here whose integration as a regular was slowed by a rare malady called chronic exertional compartment syndrome. The condition caused tissue inflammation and shin splints after vigorous exercise and eventually required surgery. He was released just prior to the start of the 1991-92 campaign.
Wade Allison - That big, dumb and tall kid sure played some mean pinball. Except, he was supposed to be trained as a hockey player. Taken in the second round of the 2017 draft out of Western Michigan, a feeder school since Wade (son of Bobby Clarke) went there and former Flyers assistant coach Andy Murray was a long-time Broncos head coach.
Allison was built, could skate and could put da puck in da net, tallying 45 goals in 4 collegiate campaigns. So the Flyers had him pegged as a third liner with top 6 potential and the “down low” guy on the power play.
Problem was, he played like an overeager teenager at times and just couldn’t stay healthy.
During a meaningless rookie game against the Rangers in 2021, Allison dropped the gloves to fight Matt Rempe and defend a teammate. During the same game, he went down in a heap during a collision in a rookie game vs. the Blueshirts, sustaining a high ankle sprain.
In January 2022, he came up limping during a game against Buffalo and was eventually diagnosed with a sprained medial collateral ligament. That November, Allison was felled by an oblique muscle strain and hip pointer.
An “unspecified injury” kept him out for three games in March 2023.
I’m not going to list them all. That’s what the internet is for, folks. Allison was placed on waivers at the outset of the 2023-24 season. He spent 46 games toiling once more for the Phantoms before a March deal shipped him to the Nashville Predators.
All told, the ginger who probably stole more souls than earned minutes of ice time logged 13 goals and 22 points in 75 games with the Orange and Black. He hasn’t seen NHL ice since, finishing the year with Milwaukee then signing with Barys Astana in the KHL last year.
Who Are You Again?
Jerome Mrazek - Nobody knows anything about him except he had a hippie-style beard, played guitar and spent a grand total of 6 minutes, 17 seconds in goal once during a blowout home win over the Blues in 1976.
Bo Berglund - A bit player for Quebec and Minnesota in the early 1980s, this Swede was a throw-in to complete a 4-player deal between the Flyers and North Stars two days after Thanksgiving 1985. Probably more famous for the guys Clarke gave up: Todd Bergen and Ed Hospodar.
Somehow made it through the Mike Keenan crucible seven times and managed two assists in one game vs. the Rangers. Played three more seasons in his home and native land.
Steve Scheifele - A sixth-round selection out of Boston College in 1986, records indicate the DC-area native suited up just one time in the NHL, and it didn’t even count: the Flyers’ second and last exhibition against the Soviet Central Red Army in January of 1990, a 5-4 loss played at the Spectrum.
Marc D’Amour - The undrafted free agent netminder found his way to Pennsylvania in 1988, fresh off a Turner Cup title with Salt Lake CIty of the International Hockey League. Another one-and-done, he played 19:19 in the third period of a loss in Boston late in Paul Holmgren’s first season as bench boss. Shipped back to Hershey, D’Amour’s nickname lived on in a bar, called “Shakey’s” not far from Hersheypark Arena.
The bar, beloved by players, coaches, team staff, fans, locals and puck bunnies alike, became “Overtimes” and is now the site of a US post office.
Hal Gill - One of the archetypes for big, plodding defensemen which defined the Dead Puck Era, the hulking Providence College product was lassoed by Holmgren in the summer of 2013 for $700K. As a spare part, he might have set records for most money earned per regular-season game: $116,666.66 for each of six times he was penned into a lineup. Gill didn’t even appear in a game until Laviolette was canned and replaced by Craig Berube, making his first start in a 1-0 win at New Jersey on Nov. 2.
A string of 44 straight healthy scratches lasting from Christmas to Easter was rudely interrupted by two more starts in games 81 and 82, then one last appearance in a playoff loss to the Rangers closed the books.
