PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Flyers’ organizational future looks brighter than it did seven months ago, on the day of the season opener in Columbus on Oct. 12.
That meant absolutely nothing to any of the players in the home dressing room at Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday in the aftermath of their season finale. The Flyers lost to the Washington Capitals, 2-1, on an empty-net goal by T.J. Oshie with three minutes to go as the Flyers attempted to win in regulation, although they were technically eliminated moments earlier after the Red Wings forced overtime with Montreal.
Even if they had qualified, the Flyers would have been widely viewed as the least talented of the 16 teams in the tournament. That’s no consolation, nor should it be. The same was arguably true of the eighth-seeded Florida Panthers just one year ago, before they shocked the NHL and advanced to the Stanley Cup Final. The seventh-seeded Nashville Predators made the final in 2017, and the eighth-seeded Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2012. In 2010, of course, the Flyers qualified on the final day of the regular season to secure the seventh seed, and got to within two wins of a championship.
Were these Flyers set up for a long playoff run? Probably not. The warts in their game over the past two months — they went 9-14-5 after Feb. 14 — speak to that. But simply suggesting that the they would have been fodder for the President’s Trophy-winning New York Rangers, and that therefore the playoffs would have been a waste of time, ignores history. That the Flyers gave the Rangers everything they could handle in all four head-to-head meetings is probably something that at least a few of them thought about over the preceding 24 hours, too, after the Rangers clinched the regular-season title on Monday. Having the Flyers’ young players taste a playoff atmosphere at Wells Fargo Center and Madison Square Garden would have helped in their development, too, even if the result was ultimately a first-round exit.
Instead, the Flyers concluded 2023-24 with a 38-33-11 record, outside of the top eight in the Eastern Conference despite being there for the majority of the season.
“Played pretty good hockey, pretty stingy hockey, for most of the year,” Scott Laughton said after the game. “This one hurts, though.”
“Right now it’s tough to really swallow, and accept the fact that we were in such a good position a couple weeks ago,” Sean Couturier said. “Just couldn’t get it done.”
The positives the Flyers can take from this season are many.
A positive, hard-working culture in which the players care for one another — and, in turn, work for one another — has been established. Emerging talents such as Tyson Foerster, Cam York and Owen Tippett have all shown themselves to be important pieces for the future, and they will all presumably get better. Veterans Travis Konecny and Travis Sanheim look like they can be important pieces and leaders on a good team, as they continue the early prime of their respective careers. Jamie Drysdale and Egor Zamula provide more hope on defense as young players with promise. Goalie Samuel Ersson, for as much as he struggled down the stretch, was as important as anyone in keeping the Flyers in the playoff race, and found his game again for the final push.
Regardless of what happens with the roster in the offseason, the Flyers should still be a competitive team in 2024-25, something that the front-office leaders value even if they probably aren’t prepared to go all-in just yet. The Flyers certainly won’t be picked to finish in the last place in the division, which is where just about everyone had them before this season began.
Still, the Flyers falling short in Game 82 is a wasted opportunity, and considering how their season was going through mid-March, when they looked like a scrappy, hard-working, structured club that was competitive almost nightly, it can’t be described as anything other than a collapse.
General manager Daniel Briere and coach John Tortorella made no secret after the trade deadline that they wanted to, and expected to, qualify for the playoffs. They should have.
The players, as they always do in these situations, should shoulder most of the blame. Yes, the goaltending falling off a cliff hurt the most, but there weren’t enough consistent contributors across the board over the final few weeks. Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost stand out as two players who didn’t make enough plays when the team desperately needed someone to step up, and either could presumably be moved in the offseason, especially if there is a significant trade or two to come. Frost was benched midway through regulation on Tuesday, and had only one goal and one assist over the final 11 games. Farabee had just one point, a goal, in the final 12 games.
But Tortorella and Briere made some decisions that backfired, too.
The situation with Couturier last month was the most puzzling. Tortorella began reducing the veteran center’s ice time pretty much the day he was named as the captain on Feb. 14, culminating in Couturier getting scratched for two games on March 19 and March 21.
Yes, a case can be made that Couturier deserved to come out of the lineup. He finished the season without a goal in his final 25 games, looking like a shell of himself when compared to just a couple months earlier, when he seemed all the way back from two seasons off due to back problems.
What is inexplicable, though, is that no one from the organization seemed to be communicating to Couturier why his ice time declined, or why he was ultimately scratched. Perhaps no one expected Couturier or his agent to publicly voice their concerns, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not how a team handles the player who is supposedly its leader. The Flyers went 1-0-1 in the two games Couturier was out, but followed it with an 0-6-2 stretch. No one — not Couturier, not Tortorella, and not Briere, for allowing it to happen under his watch — looked good. That it precipitated their losing streak is conspicuous.
Tortorella deserves credit for so many of the positives that occurred this season. He’s probably going to get some down-ballot votes for the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s best coach, and they will be deserved. He will return as the coach next season, too, according to a team source, and he should.
But when it comes to the Couturier situation, Tortorella should have already known that his young, inexperienced team wasn’t exactly set up to handle distraction very well. After all, the Flyers lost five in a row in regulation leading up to the All-Star break, coinciding with the shock and unpleasantness of Carter Hart’s departure in late January and subsequent arrest.
That extra noise in March, during a very tenuous time, also included Tortorella calling the team soft, while indicating that maybe too many players in the dressing room didn’t have “enough balls” after a 4-3 overtime loss to the Islanders on April 1. The Flyers losing three straight in ugly fashion immediately after those comments to Buffalo, Columbus and Montreal is essentially what ended up sealing their fate. That should have been at least four points in the standings.
The Flyers’ miserable power play, which will finish last in the league at just 12.2 percent, is also on the coaching staff. The constant tinkering with the units never allowed any of them to develop any chemistry.
Briere’s late-season decisions are more forgivable. The trade of Sean Walker brought them back a 2025 first round pick, and even if it did remove their most consistent defenseman to that point, it was in line with where the organizational philosophy is in its so-called rebuild. And, he couldn’t have anticipated that the Flyers would lose Drysdale and Nick Seeler to injury shortly after that, which, along with Rasmus Ristolainen’s continued absence, decimated the blue line for a key stretch.
But the backup goalie situation is Briere’s responsibility, particularly in that Tortorella said last week that the organization figured before the season began that it might lose Hart at some point due to the Hockey Canada investigation. Neither Cal Petersen nor Felix Sandstrom was able to handle even spot duty at the NHL level, and that forced Tortorella into overplaying Ersson, who wasn’t ready for such a significant workload. Tortorella perhaps could have given his backups more of a shot in order to preserve Ersson’s energy, but it’s difficult to blame him for riding Ersson, either. There just wasn’t anyone else, even if the end result was the Flyers having two ineffective goalies throughout March and early April, rather than just one.
Changes will happen this offseason, as they always do. Maybe in the long run, these late-season failures will build character with the core group that remains, and prevent this sort of thing from happening again when the expectations are higher. That the Flyers remained competitive and in the race all the way up until their final game is a tremendous credit to everyone in the organization, from the top on down. The new front office, also including president of hockey operations Keith Jones, did some seriously impressive work in a short amount of time, and Flyers fans should be genuinely excited for what comes next.
In that sense, the season can be viewed as a success — as long as everyone learns from their collective, late-season crash.
(Photo: Eric Hartline / USA Today)
