Phanatic Hockey Editor
We’re only seven games into this regular season and already the stupids have all come out to play. If I’m being honest, I’m only shocked that normality didn’t last until the home matinee 11 days from now against the Anaheim Ducks.
It was bad enough with the Flyers starting 0-2-2, outplayed for a majority of those 240-plus minutes and outshot by a margin of minus-82. But there were signs of life. In Ottawa on Thursday, despite a 2-1 setback, the Flyers scored a power play goal. They also controlled the first 8 minutes of action, then a majority of the second period and swarmed the Sens end in the final 95 seconds of regulation.
In Boston on Saturday afternoon, with three regulars missing, how could it be anything other than the same old thing? They lost, 5-1. Then, with the same 3 guys missing, they lost at home on Sunday to Carolina, 4-1.
At least we could wipe Christian Dvorak’s name from the no-goal ledger. Of course, that only left regulars Travis Konecny, Trevor Zegras, Sean Couturer, Denver Barkey, Noah Cates, Noel Acciari, Nick Seeler, Cam York, Jamie Drysdale, Rasmus Risolainen, Simon Benoit and Carl Grundstrom with goose eggs.
Baby steps to the blue line, baby steps to the goal, as Bob Wylie might say.
Typical for an old-school head coach, Tocchet laid the responsibility on his charges.
“It wasn’t great, don’t get me wrong. But it was zero-zero halfway through the game. I think we were hanging in there,” he admitted in Sunday’s postgame. “Then we don’t make a 10-foot pass. We don’t win a wall battle. And then they get the goal and we get dejected. We just didn’t have enough guys pullin’”
Losers in a franchise-record 7 straight to start the season. Two points. Just us and Calgary without wins. Execution lacking. Confidence tanked. Compete level wavering. By my count online since 10 pm Sunday, there’s been 57 “Fire Tocchet” posts and 34 “Fire Briere” posts.
Flyers GM Danny Briere was in Boston. In the pregame, he lambasted the club’s lack of compete in the early going. That’s a sign. His presence this early is telling – as was the front office’s visit to Allentown on Sunday afternoon ahead of the Carolina night cap. It’s a first strike, assessing water-testing call-ups from the Phantoms.
More importantly (and let’s not ask why), Briere has yet to even offer the slightest hint Tocchet is resting his rump on anything above room temperature – a stance backed up on Monday morning by international hockey insider Elliotte Friedman.
The Flyers have, in fact, upped their competitiveness from 0 to 10 all the way up to roughly 30 minutes a night, but have exactly zero points to show for it. Bizarre that their worse-than-professional efforts actually produced the only two points on their ledger.
Oh simple things, where have you gone? Tocchet didn’t have any insight into Keane’s 2004 musical question or one from a media member on Sunday, either.
“I don’t know if it’s a lack of focus, you’re nervous or pressured, I can’t give you that answer,” he said. “At the end of (last) year, you make a mistake, someone would cover for you. Now, they’re making duplicate mistakes. It’s evident for me. It’s a tough thing to correct, other than working every day.”
I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear. Might just have to live through whatever’s coming. Want Tocchet fired? Briere, too? Tough nuggets. It’s gonna burn and sting. There’s nothing you can do about it. Keep screaming on the internet, though.
The necessary historical context
Twice before the franchise opened up a season without winning for 6 games.
The first one was a shock: 1999-2000. Eric Lindros’ last season in Philadelphia. Even before all the internal drama hit, they started off 0-4-1-1. No Keith Jones for 6 weeks and no Brind’Amour for 2 months didn’t help.
They were shut out in back-to-back home games to start the season for the only time in 60 years. Scored 1 goal in the first 3 games. Eventually the ship stopped listing, as the team reeled off 4 straight wins and went 8-1-1 in their next 10 outings.
The other time was 2008-09. No going back for John Stevens and a small cadre of former Phantoms who won the Calder Cup in 2005 and were elevated to team leaders after a surprise trip to the conference finals. They opened up 0-3-3 including back-to-back wild losses to San Jose beyond regulation.
That team might have been cursed when Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin dropped the puck before a season-opening home loss to the Rangers. After their initial troubles, they won 4 in a row and hit Thanksgiving on an 11-3-1 run – but hit a trough in between which required some front office action.
You think the chronically online are all over Tocchet like flies to rotting meat now? They would have had a feeding frenzy with Stevens, who unironically called his new forecheck method heading into ‘08 “Dump and Hunt” rather than a dump-and-chase which the Penguins picked clean the previous spring.
By the way, both teams rebounded to make the playoffs.
So did the 2013-14 squad which tuned out Peter Laviolette, forced the front office to slide Craig Berube behind the bench after an 0-3 start and still couldn’t score for the season’s first 6 weeks. That club set the original dubious record of 8 total goals in the season’s opening 6 games. This year’s team beat that by one. That team also got in gear with a month-long 9-3-1 run after opening at 4-10-1.
So maybe it’s short-tempered reactionaries treating a 6-month grind in hockey like a 17-week sprint in football and crashing out in a public forum, rather than a horrible start caused by complacency of mid-level talent compounded by chronic front-office systemic rot.
And if you want to blow out a GM -- it better be on the level of Bob Clarke totally checked out for a year-plus before any Bloody Sundays happen.
Still, there’s a nagging thought already that this season may be a teensy bit different.
Why we can trust reverse 20/20 vision
The slender thread which held together the Flyers’ success in April and May seems more like an aberration.
After going up 3 games to none on the Penguins in the Eastern quarterfinals, they’ve lost 13 of their last 14 games. The one they *did* win was a fluke long-range overtime prayer which kept them from the record books.
If the Flyers didn’t take Game 6 at home and remove that anvil they placed on their own shoulders by not winning Games 4 and 5, the Pens had 100% of the momentum and tell me they wouldn’t have won Game 7 in Pittsburgh. So, right now, we’d be extra miserable ruminating over the unwashable stain of a reverse sweep as an appetizer to a pair of franchise records for season-opening malaise.
I was there on Black Friday of 1991 when an angry sellout crowd roared “PAUL MUST GO” with the Flyers losing to the Penguins 9-3 in Game 23 of Paul Holmgren’s 4th season as head coach. I was there in 2015 when, game after game after the All-Star break, chants of “FIRE CHIEF” rained down loud enough to be heard up in the press box, at home through your TVs and certainly could be read via Steve Mason’s intense 500-yard stare in the locker room.
Firings don’t work the way the screaming mimis want them to. Holmgren was on the leash for 5 ½ more days and 2 more games because the front office couldn’t track down Bill Dineen. Berube wasn’t shown the door until the 14-15 season was over.
This is new territory. “FIRE TOCCHET” in the waning moments of Game 7 of a regular season, 89 games into his coaching tenure and 89 games into a 5-year contract. In this moment, the paying customers are loud – but wrong. Briere hasn’t yet said a peep about Tocchet. In Sunday’s postgame, Zegras even gave Tocchet a public vote of confidence.
“He’s an amazing person. He’s an amazing coach,” Zegras said, catching onto a bit more of the media training which struck Porter Martone and Travis Sanheim when asked what the team needs to do to start looking like professionals.
Martone even used the Lavy-ism “jam” in his comments on Saturday then talked about “dog mentality” on Sunday. There goes the next chief of police.
Think you can’t fire the players? Wrong. You can’t do it now. Not 13 days into a season. But 3-to-4 weeks? Yeah.
By Halloween, there are a certain number of NHL GMs whose cell phone bills are going to spike. And Briere’s better be one of them – provided there’s any trade value left in a roster that’s heading for a crash faster than Wile E. Coyote after deploying a defective Acme product.
The earliest significant body-for-body in-season trade in team history which led to immediate improvement was Paul Holmgren shipping grinders Steve Downie and Steve Eminger to Tampa Bay for young, offensive-oriented blueliner Matt Carle on Nov. 7, 2008 – exactly 28 days after Palin-gate. That’s your bar for Briere.
The only way out is through
Captain Couturier said (to the floor) there’s “no quit” on his club and that a turnaround is a matter of simplifying the game.
“We’re playing slow, we’re not making the right reads, we’re not winning races,” he said Sunday night. “We’re out of sync. There’s not really any excuses right now.”
Well, if the head coach publicly calls out the team’s inability to make 10-foot passes or win board battles – how “simple” is a recalibration going to be? What’s kindergarten-level practice sets for million-dollar pros? A visit with Hockey Central and a bunch of 10-year-olds?
If Tocchet’s message isn’t getting through, in one-and-one-tenth seasons as coach, the responsibility to compete and execute is squarely on the players. Gun to my head, responsibility shifts onto his shoulders at the end of this season. There’s still 77 games to salvage … something.
The only potential damning public comments so far on his end came before Saturday’s loss. When asked about what was different between last year and this year, Tocchet let the facade slip a bit:
“We’re not gonna out chance (other teams) most nights … we have to play who we are. Playing good defense, being good in the neutral zone, I think we got a little away with it. That’s why the disparity in shots. Finally, we took the attitude to get pucks to the net. That helped us.”
He’s basically admitting “low-event hockey” is not just playing hawkish hockey in the neutral or limiting chances in the d-zone. It’s about playing so buttoned-up in the other two-thirds of the ice, that the offense has to constantly make the most of limited o-zone activity.
Keep an ear out for little slips like this as we go along…
